


UBRARY OF CONGRESS 




Class 
Book. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



PSYCHOLOGY 



BOOKS BY HUGO MUNSTERBERG 

Psychology and Life 

■pp. 286, Boston. 1899 

Grundziige der Psychologie 

pp. 665, Leipzig, 1900 

American Traits 

pp. 235, Boston, 1902 

Die Amerikaner 

pp. 502 and 3^9, Berlin, 1904 {Rev. 1912) 

Principles of Art Education 

pp. 118, New York, 1905 

The Eternal Life 

pp. 72, Boston, 1905 

Science and Idealism 

pp. 71, Boston, 1906 
Philosophic der Werte 

pp. 486, Leipzig, 1907 

On the Witness Stand 

pp. 269, New York, 1908 

Aus Deutsch-Amerika 

pp. 245, Berlin, 1909 

The Eternal Values 

pp. 436, Boston, 1909 

Psychotherapy 

pp. 401, New York, 1909 

Psychology and the Teacher 

pp. 330, New York, 1910 

American Problems 

pp. 220, New York, 1910 

Psychologic und Wirtschaftsleben 

pp. 192, Leipzig, 1912 

Vocation and Learning 

pp. 289, St. Louis, 1912 

Psychology and Industrial Efficiency 

pp. 321, Boston, 1913 

American Patriotism 

pp. 262, New York, 1913 

Grundziige der Psychotechnik 

pp. 767, Leipzig, 1914 

Psychology and Social Sanity 

pp. 320, New York, 1914 

Psychology, General and Applied 

New York, 1914 



PSYCHOLOGY 

GENERAL AND APPLIED 



BY 

HUGO MUNSTERBERG 




D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 

1914 






^v^y 



COPTEIGHT, 1914, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



I 

SEP -3 1914 

Printed in the United States of America 

•©C1,A380202 



To 

Herbert Sidney Langfeld. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/psychologygenera01mn 



PREFACE 

It can hardly be claimed that a new textbook of 
psychology is needed because there is lack of old ones. 
On the contrary, we have a bewildering variety, and 
America has contributed a large and brilliant share. Yet 
the plan and aim of the present book are very different 
from all of them. 

One difference is indicated even by its sub-title; it 
includes the applied psychology as well as the general. 
Hitherto the textbooks have been confined to the theo- 
retical study. The time seems ripe for bringing the 
psychological work into full contact with the practical 
efforts of civilization. The application of psychological 
studies to education and law, to industry and commerce, 
to health and hygiene, to art and science, deserves its place 
in the psychological curriculum. Thus the last third of 
this book may be a supplement to any other textbook. 

But the book adds to the usual material still another 
essential part. The psychology of our textbooks is 
individual psychology; this volume also includes the 
social psychology. The processes which result from the 
social contact have traditionally been neglected, because 
individual psychology had to reach a certain completeness 
before the scientific interest could turn to social conscious- 
ness. But our day, which has seen the ripening of applied 
psychology, has brought us also the rapid growth of social 
psychology, and its outlines ought to be drawn in any 
map of the psychological world. 

Finally, the traditional psychology is confined to 
descriptions and explanations. Yery justly, such an ex- 
planatory account of mental life omits an entirely different 

vii 



viii PEEFACE 

aspect, its inner meaning. But this meaning of the acts 
of our mind offers, after all, problems of its own. They 
must be solved; we cannot simpjy ignore them. This 
book, therefore, traces them in a special part, called 
Purposive Psychology. Our causal psychology is and 
must be a psychology without a soul, the purposive 
psychology culminates in the understanding of the soul 
and its freedom. 

While the addition of an applied, a social and a pur- 
posive part makes the material of this book very different 
from the others, its method, too, deviates in many respects 
from the customary procedure. I may mention one nega- 
tive feature: it is not concerned with the structure of the 
l^rain and of the sense organs. A book which sketches 
the outlines of psychology cannot include the details 
of accessory sciences like the anatomy of the nervous 
system. In a college course the instructor may easily 
add such information and show pictures and models. 

On the other hand, the book emphasizes the principles, 
both the biological-physiological and the philosophical. 
Those who dislike to touch philosophical problems in 
psychology can easily omit the chapters on the principles 
of causal psychology and again those on purposive 
psychology. Yet it is hardly wise to encourage this aver- 
sion for the wider aspects. Do we not deceive ourselves 
if we fancy that we can approach the study of mental 
states with the same naivete with which we can turn to the 
study of minerals and plants? 

HUGO MtJNSTERBERG. 
Harvard University, May, 1914. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION 
THE AIMS OF PSYCHOLOGY 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Interest in Psychology 1 

Naive interest in psychology, 1. Scientific 
interest in psychology, 4. 

II. The Realm of Psychology 7 

The definitions of psychology, 7. The two 
standpoints in psychology, 10. Demand for 
consistency, 14. Causal and purposive psy- 
chology, 15. 



BOOK I 

CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 
PART I. PRINCIPLES OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 

III. Psychological Explanation 21 

Psychological laws, 21. The unconscious, 
24. The subconscious dispositions, 26. The 
subconscious operations, 28. 

IV. Psychophysical Explanation 34 

Connection of mind and brain, 34. Psy- 
chophysical parallelism, 39. 

V. Scope and Methods of Causal Psychology . 43 
The subdivisions of psj^chology, 43. Self- 
observation, 47. Indirect obseiwation, 50. 
Experimental psychology, 52, 
ix 



CONTENTS 



PART II. THE INDIVIDUAL PROCESSES 
A. THE ELEMENTARY INDIVIDUAL PROCESSES 

CHAPTER PAGE 

YI. The Nervous System .59 

The sense organ-brain-muscle arc, 59. The 
development of the nervous system, 61. The 
biological aspect of man, 65. 

VII. Stimulation 70 

The psychical elements, 70. Optical stimu- 
lation : The system of light sensations, 72; 
Saturation and brightness, 75; The visual 
stimuli, 78. Auditory stimulation : The system 
of sound sensations, 85 ; The acoustic stimuli, 
87. The lower sense stimulations : Taste, 95 ; 
Smell, 97; Touch, 98; Temperature, 100. In- 
ternal stimulation : Movement sensations, 101 ; 
Feeling sensations, 105. 

VIII. Association . . . o 107 

After-effects in the nerve centers, 107. As- 
sociation by contiguity, 111. Association by 
similarity, 113. The character of the repro- 
duction, 116. Conditions of association, 119. 

IX. Reaction . 122 

The motor process, 122. The sensory ef- 
fects of the motor processes, 127 

X. Inhibition 131 

The suppression of mental contents, 131. 
The central problem of inhibition, 135. The 
inhibition of actions, 138. The action theory, 
139. 



B. THE COMPLEX INDIVIDUAL PROCESSES 

XI. Perception 145 

Unity of perception, 145. The elements "of 
space perception, 147. Space perception and 
muscle action, 150. Theory of space percep- 



CONTEXTS xi 

CHAPTER PAGE 

tion, 152. Perception of time, 156. Percep- 
tion of meaning, 160. 

XII. Ideas . . 165 

Memory, 165. Imagination, 170. General 
ideas, 172. 

XIII. ACTR'ITY 176 

The impulse feeling, 176. The rivalry of 
motives, 179. Complex actions, 183. Atten- 
tion, 187. The thought process, 192. 

XIV. Inner States 196 

Pleasure and displeasure, 196. The physio- 
logical basis of simple feelings, 198. The 
manifoldness of feelings, 201. Emotions, 203. 
The esthetic attitude, 207. The intellectual 
attitude, 209. 

XV. Personality 213 

The unitj^ of the jDersonality, 213. Self- 
consciousness, 216. The variations of the per- 
sonality, 221. 

PART III. THE SOCIAL GROUP 

A. ELEMENTARY GROUP PROCESSES 

XVI. Individual Differences 221 

The aim of social psychology, 224. Child- 
hood and maturit}'-, 227. Sex and race, 231. 
Character and temperament, 235. Intelli- 
gence, 238. Abnormal variations, 211.' 

XVII. Union 246 

The conditions of organization, 246. Volun- 
tary and involuntary communication, 248. 
Language, 250. Associations, 251. 

XVIII. Submission 254 

Suggestion and selfassertion, 254. Imita- 
tion and sympathy, 259. Aggression and self- 
expression, 262. 



xii CONTENTS 

B. THE COMPLEX SOCIAL PROCESSES 

CHAPTEK PAGE 

XIX. Oeganization 265 

The individual and the social mind, 265. 
Involuntary combinations, 269. Intentional 
combinations, 273. 

XX. Achievement .• 275 

The biological aspect, 275. Material and 
methods, 277. The types of social achieve- 
ments, 278. 



BOOK II 
PURPOSIVE PSYCHOLOGY 

PART I. PRINCIPLES OF PURPOSIVE PSYCHOLOGY 

XXI. Immediate Reality 285 

The two psychologies, 285. Causal psy- 
chology and reality, 288. Scientific recon- 
struction, 290. Purposive understanding, 293. 

XXII. The Soul 297 

Purposive acts and causality, 297. Pur- 
posive acts and time, 301. The connection of 
purposive acts, 302. The function of the 
soul, 306. 



PART II. THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES 

XXIII. Meaning 310 

Meaning in practical life, 310. Problems 
and methods, 312. The pointing to an oppo- 
site, 315. The affirmation of sameness, 316. 

XXIV. Creation 321 

Analysis of purposes, 321. The freedom 
of the will, 323. The creative power, 326. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

XXV. 



PART III. THE SOCIAL EXPERIENCES 

PAGE 

Practical Relations 329 

Understanding, 329. Interpretation, 330. 



XXVI. Ideal Relatioxs 335 

The ideal purposes, 335. The normative 
acts, 336. 

BOOK III 
APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY 
PART I. PRINCIPLES OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY 

XXVII. The Aim of Practical Psychology .... 341 
The present situation of practical psychol- 
ogy, 341. The limitations of applied psy- 
chology, 346. 

XXVIII. The Psychohistorical Sciences 352 

Two types of application, 352, Historical 
individuals, 356. Historical social events, 359. 
History and purposive psychology, 363. 



PART 11. THE PSYCHOTECHNICAL SCIENCES 

XXIX. Educational Psychology 365 

The educational pmposes, 365. The im- 
parting of knowledge, 369. The development 
of abilities, 375. The arousing of feelings, • 
380. The work of the pupils, 382. The se- 
lection of studies, 386. Adjustment to indi- 
vidual differences, 389. 

XXX. Legal Psychology 395 

The report of the witness, 395. Memory 
and suggestibility of the witness, 398, The 
discoveiy of hidden ideas, 402, The court and 
the criminal, 406. Prevention of crime, 409. 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

XXXI. 



XXXII. 



XXXIII. 



Economic Psychology 

Psychotechnics of commerce and industry 
413. The selection of the industrial worker, 
415. The adjustment by experimental meth- 
ods, 418. The apprentice, 421. The technic 
423. Monotony and fatigue, 425. The inter- 
ests of commerce, 428. 

Medical Psychology ......... 

The practical standpoint, 435. Diagnosis 
of physical disturbances, 437. Diagnosis of 
mental disturbances, 438. The effect of drugs, 
443. Psychotherapy, 443. Prevention of dis- 
ease, 448. 

Cultural Psychology 

The outlying fields of psychotechnics, 452. 
Life enjoyment, 454. The fine arts, 455. 
Music and poetry, 460. The work of the sci- 
entist, 462. The work of the historian and of 
the philologist, 466. The work of the psy- 
chologist, 469. 



PAGE 

413 



435 



452 



PSYCHOLOGY 

INTRODUCTION. THE AIMS OF 
PSYCHOLOGY 

CHAPTER I 

THE INTEREST IN PSYCHOLOGY 

Naive Interest in Psychology. — Long before we turned 
to any scientific psychology, we all were interested in the 
traits of mental life. To be sure, we watched our material 
surroundings and were captivated by the happenings of 
outer nature, before we became aware of the processes in 
our inner life. But, after all, everybody noticed early 
whether his memory worked well or badly, how his atten- 
tion sometimes failed him, how he was able or unable to 
think out a problem, how fear or hope, and joy or anger, 
arose in him. He may have been startled by the wonders 
of his dreams or by the play of his imagination; he may 
have thought about the limits of his personal talents or 
about the special gifts of his mind ; he may have felt con- 
flicts between his resolutions and his will. In short, the 
naive curiosity which turned first to toys and tools, to 
stones and plants, later turned to memory ideas and fancies 
of the imagination, to feelings and excitements, to acts of 
desire and of volition, to talent and intelligence. They 
cannot be found without: the attention must turn inward 
to observe them. But at the same time we knew and 

1 



2 PSYCHOLOGY 

watched the inner life of the other people around us. We 
became aware of the varied behavior of men and followed 
their expression, we tried to understand their peculiar 
ways and became interested in the display of emotions 
of those with whom we were in contact. This interest in 
the behavior of other beings extends to dog and horse and 
bird. 

All such naive observing of our own mental life and of 
that of our friends satisfies the natural desire for knowl- 
edge, even if the knowledge is not useful for any practical 
ends. Yet the practical life drives us steadily toward such 
observation, too. We do not want merely to take notice of 
the curious fact that something which we did remember 
has slipped from our memory, or that the solution of a 
problem suddenly rushes to our mind, or that our atten- 
tion wanders away during a lecture, or that our liking was 
stronger than our will. We want to understand still more 
how much we can trust our memory and our attention and 
our will, and how we can train our mind or how we can 
suppress an unwelcome emotion. Above all, we want to 
look into our neighbor's mind for our practical purposes. 
How will he behave? His friendliness or his unkindness, 
his carefulness or his negligence, his good or his bad mem- 
ory, his humor or his character, may be matters of deep 
concern to us. We try to foresee how another's mind will 
work just as we try to foresee how the physical instruments 
and the chemical substances will help or hinder us. 

At first all this remains unconnected, and does not shape 
itself into any general idea of mind and mind's action. 
But it easily leads further from mere curiosity to an ear- 
nest interest. The haphazard knowledge of human be- 
havior becomes broader, we notice regularities which occur 
in our mental life, we get a clearer insight into its limita- 
tions, and we may be led to a common sense theory about 
the nature of that inner being. We begin to think about 
the relation of the mind to the body, of freedom and re- 



THE INTEEEST IN PSYCHOLOGY 3 

sponsibility, of the inheritance of mental qualities, of the 
life of the mind after death. In the same way our obser- 
vation of mental life in the interest of practical purposes 
becomes deeper and wider. The manifold purposes of civi- 
lization demand this from us. We cannot bring up chil- 
dren or teach them in classrooms wdthout carefully watch- 
ing their mental qualities and without trying to foresee 
how their minds will work in new situations. We cannot 
deal with criminals in the courtroom without trying to 
analyze the motives w^hich impel them. Nor can we be in 
politics without thinking about the ideas and impulses, the 
character and the abilities of the public men. We cannot 
be interested in industrial problems and social questions 
without giving attention to the mind of the workingman, 
to his fatigue and to his feelings, to the strain on his 
attention and to the satisfaction of his desires. 

Theoretical interest and practical demands alike lead us 
in this way at first to a naive, and then to a deliberate, 
watching of mental life, and by this to the gate of psy- 
chology. We need only to make the observation more 
painstaking and careful, more extended and systematic, 
and we are in the midst of psychology. Of course as soon 
as we aim toward such deliberate study of the mind, we 
shall apply more reliable methods than a mere occasional 
watching of events in our inner life or in the behavior of 
our neighbors. The botanist, when he examines the plants, 
can no longer be satisfied with the way in which the friend 
of nature strolls through the woods and the meadows, pick- 
ing the flowers which he likes along the path; he seeks 
definite kinds of plants, dissects them and studies them 
under his microscope. The psychologist, too, will make 
himself independent of mere chance, will collect his data 
from the widest fields of human experience, will produce 
mental processes at will in order to examine them, will pro- 
voke all kinds of mental behavior in man and animal, will 
compare the mental characteristics in adult and child, in 



4 PSYCHOLOGY 

man and woman, in normal and diseased persons, in dif- 
ferent races and under different conditions of life. He will 
repeat and repeat his observations, will disentangle the 
complex inner states and will seek the elements from which 
they are composed, and he, too, will use subtle instruments 
and carefully adjusted apparatus to discover the real facts. 
But with all this refinement of method and with the expan- 
sion of the outlook, the original interest does not change its 
character, but only its strength and seriousness. 

Scientific Interest in Psychology. — The motives which 
may lead us to the systematic study of psychology are as 
manifold as the naive interests. First of all, we want to 
understand the working of the mind, the laws which con- 
trol its processes, the conditions under which it works, the 
effects which it produces ; we want to understand the inner 
ties between our mental states, their meaning, the elements 
which enter into them. This theoretical science will branch 
out into special sciences which deal with child psychology 
or pathological psychology or animal psychology or the 
psychology of individual differences. Moreover the study 
cannot be confined to single individuals. Their mental 
life is combined in social action. If we are to understand 
mental life, we must follow up the working together of 
human minds from the simplest contact in a friendly talk 
to the firmest connections in a life of mutual devotion, from 
the narrowest circle of the family to the widest circle of 
the civilized nations. The behavior of the social group and 
the laws of the social mind and the meaning of the social 
impulses thus fall no less into the compass of psycho- 
logical interest. 

But, as on the level of simple commonsense, so now 
on the higher level of science, we cannot remain merely 
theoretical. The practical demands take control of our 
endeavors. This is not meant in a trivial sense of mere 
selfish usefulness. Those practical motives with which we 
may approach the study of psychology are of service to 



THE INTEREST IN PSYCHOLOGY 5 

the highest tasks of cultured society. The aims of educa- 
tion and justice, of health and social reform, of industrial 
enterprise and esthetic achievement, make it daily more 
necessary to understand the mental factor which enters 
into the social practice. The engineer must recognize that 
the mind of the workingman is no less important for the 
final industrial outcome than the machines. The lawyer 
cannot confine his interest to the legal problem; he must 
understand the working of the minds of all who figure in 
the court, the defendant and the plaintiff, the witness and 
the jury. The teacher of our modem days knows that an 
understanding of the mind of the pupils is worthy of the 
same scholarly effort which is devoted to the content of 
instruction. The physician is aware that his drugs and his 
remedies must be supplemented by carefully adjusted in- 
fluences on the mind of the patient. 

The application of psychological knowledge, however, 
may not be limited to the practical tasks to be fulfilled. 
We may apply psychology for the understanding of the 
life around us and of the life which has passed away. 
With the interest of the historian we may try to analyze 
the psychological processes of the events of earlier times. 
The personalities of the heroes and the movements of the 
masses, the leaders in politics and in war, in religion and in 
art and in every unfolding of civilization may be brought 
nearer to our understanding by the application of psy- 
chology. The great wars and revolutions, the growth of 
nations and their decay, the development of religions and 
arts, the changes in the language and customs, all may be 
explained with the help of psychological knowledge. 

We desire to know and to understand the working of 
the mind with the theoretical interest with which we study 
the stones and the stars. We feel the practical interest 
which makes us master the mental reality to use it as a 
tool for the purposes of civilization. Yet these are not 
the only motives for such a study. The interests which 



6 PSYCHOLOGY 

lead toward the pursuit of scholarly psychology may arise 
from a still deeper source. We want to understand the 
problems of inner life and of human behavior, because we 
feel, at first vaguely, that they are intimately connected 
with the ultimate questions of our life reality. To under- 
stand the science of our mind then no longer means to 
acquire some little specialistic knowledge, as if we were to 
learn a chance chapter of natural science or history, but 
it means insight into the last meaning of our total exist- 
ence : what are we, and whence do we come ? Is our will 
free in its decisions, or is it dependent upon the actions 
of the brain? Is our mind really controlling our body, or 
are our mental processes only accompanying the currents 
in the nervous system? And such questions lead at once 
to those of freedom and responsibility, and further on to 
the deepest problems of duty and morality, and ultimately 
of religion. Or again we may turn to psychology under 
the pressure of other philosophical doubts. We seek truth 
and beauty and morality in the belief that these ideals have 
a lasting value of their own; must not our loyal belief be 
undermined by the understanding that such thoughts of 
ideals are merely processes in individual minds, and thus 
dependent upon the psychological laws? How can these 
ideals be valid for us personally, how can they be binding 
for mankind, if they are nothing but the passing states of 
our mind, like memories and dreams? The deepest con- 
cerns of our soul are here involved. 



CHAPTER II 
THE REALM OF PSYCHOLOGY 

The Definitions of Psychology. — We have discussed the 
reasons why men may turn to psychology, but we have not 
as yet stated what psychology really is. We have gone 
on without any exact definition ; we have so far left every- 
thing in the vague and indefinite form in which common- 
sense takes hold of it. We have spoken of inner life or of 
mental states or of human behavior, of observing our inner 
experience, of understanding personalities, of describing 
and explaining the processes of the mind, and we have used 
some other similarly general terms without even asking 
whether they characterize correctly the aims of the psy- 
chologist. We might just as well have spoken of the soul 
or of consciousness, or, to use the more scholarly term, of 
psychical phenomena. No one of such phrases was pro- 
posed as a definition to mark out clearly the work which 
the student of psychology has to take up. 

Usually textbooks of psychology begin with a precise 
definition. We have abstained from that, because there is 
some danger involved in such a starting point. All astron- 
omers agree as to what astronomy can be and ought to be ; 
but the psychologists disagree as to the aims of psychology. 
Only where a consensus of opinion exists can it be right 
to begin at once with a definite statement of what the par- 
ticular science is called to undertake. Where different 
views are possible we have hardly a right to go to the 
work with a more or less arbitrary decision that one defini- 

7 



8 PSYCHOLOGY 

tion and not another is to be accepted. To discover what 
psychology really is, onight to be the goal of a penetrating 
inquiry. Various possibilities ought to be considered. The 
neglect of this demand has too often led to a regrettable 
one-sidedness. It may even be that the inner life de- 
mands different kinds of scientific treatment, which may be 
equally justified and which may equally fall into the com- 
pass of that which the vagueness of commonsense would 
call psychology. Then we should have no right to say that, 
because one kind of psychology is valuable, therefore no 
other exists. There may be two or more standpoints pos- 
sible in psychology, and a general definition ought to be 
wide enough to include them. Yes, it may be said that to 
reach a clear understanding as to the true meaning of psy- 
chology is a more difficult task than the solution of any 
special psychological prohlem. And it must be frankly 
confessed that, while modern psychology has made rapid 
progress in the mastery of the special facts, it has pro- 
gressed only slowly toward this fundamental problem of 
psychology, what its aim ought to be. 

This may seem to some a slow way of approach. They 
are anxious to come to the actual facts of mental life and 
to study the realities of conscious experience instead of en- 
tering into cumbersome discussions about the principles 
and underlying purposes of psychology. They do not want 
abstract theories, which seem to them a wrangling about 
words, but are longing for a knowledge of concrete proc- 
esses and their laws. But such a desire for a hasty ap- 
proach to the details is ill advised; its hope is illusory. 
The uncritical rush toward the mental states cannot bring 
us nearer to them. "We must know first what kind of facts 
belong to our study, and what way of approach is de- 
manded by it. And if we do not settle these preliminary 
questions patiently, we cannot wonder if later we find 
confusion among the so-called facts. 

The objects of psychology cannot be collected like flow- 



THE REALM OF PSYCHOLOGY 9 

ers, which we pick, and butterflies, which we catch, and 
which we can bring home and show to others. IMemory 
ideas and imaginative acts, feelings and emotions, volitions 
and judgments are not facts which can be picked or 
caught. And if we speak of them, describe them to others, 
and make their meaning clear, or explain them, we must 
have somehow settled for ourselves those problems of 
theory. We cannot take hold of any mental facts without 
seeing them through some kind of a theory, and, if we 
really aim toward a consistent view of mental life, we 
have no right to be satisfied with the superficialities of 
commonsense or with the dogmatic statements of an arbi- 
trary definition : we must really examine what it means to 
speak of psychological facts, and how psychology is to 
approach them. 

As to certain aims, to be sure, all psychologists agree. 
Here, above all, belongs their decision to abstain from 
any judgment of value. If the psychologist approaches 
mental life, he has no interest in asking whether the mental 
states are valuable or not. He does not care whether the 
will impulses in the mind are good or bad, moral or im- 
moral, whether the imaginings of the mind are beautiful or 
ugly, whether the thoughts in the mind are wise or foolish, 
whether the emotions of the mind are holy or sinful. The 
dissecting botanist is interested in the ugliest weed as much 
as in the beautiful flower, the chemist cares for the con- 
stitution of the deadly poison as much as for that of the 
helpful drug. In the same way the psychologist is surely 
interested in the analysis of the criminal act as much as 
in that of the heroic deed, in the babbling of the insane 
mind as much as in the reasoning of the thinker, in the 
silliest play of the infant as much as in the highest crea- 
tive processes of the artistic mind. He remains the neutral 
observer who understands and explains the mental events 
without forming a judgment on them. As soon as he 
begins to evaluate them he oversteps the boundaries of his 



10 PSYCHOLOGY 

realm and is trespassing on the fields of logic, ethics and 
esthetics. 

But so long as we only agree that the value aspect of 
mental life is not accessible to the psychologist, we have 
not settled anything as to his material. We may begin 
here, too, with a negative claim: the psychologist is not 
concerned with the outer physical objects. The processes 
and laws of bodies as such are never the material for 
a psychological study. Yet with this we are already 
approaching debatable ground. Some might doubt the 
correctness of this sweeping statement, and limit it to 
the inorganic world and the vegetable kingdom. They 
would say that, if we approach the bodies of the animals 
and above all the bodies of the human organisms, we 
have a part of the physical world before us which is of 
greatest importance for the psychologist. But there is no 
real contradiction. Nobody can doubt that the mental life 
which the psychologist studies is most intimately connected 
with the functions of the body, of the nervous system, of 
the brain. But while it is so firmly connected, and while 
the body and its functions are thus indeed of deepest im- 
port for the psychologist, the body is not itself the real 
object of his study. The growth of the flowers is intimately 
dependent upon the soil and the water and the light, and 
yet water and light and soil are not the objects of the 
botanist's study. The mental life may be dependent upon 
the nervous system and the brain, but it does not consist of 
such physical processes. 

The Two Standpoints in Psychology. — The elements 
which we have gathered so far in order to define the aims 
of psychology are two. "We have said that the psycholo- 
gist is interested only in the inner experiences as against 
the outer physical world, and that he has to do with 
them in a theoretical way, abstaining from all judgments 
of value, from all liking and disliking, praising and blam- 
ing. But this is certainly still insufficient for a positive 



THE REALM OF PSYCHOLOGY 11 

account of his actual work, because the chief question re- 
mains: what is inner experience, what is our inner per- 
sonal life? The difficulty lies in the fact that we can 
take account of ourselves in several ways and the inner 
experience may thus appear as something very different, 
from different standpoints. The frequent failure to dis- 
criminate them is more than anything else responsible for 
the confusion and the shortcomings in the field of psy- 
chology. We can take two fundamental attitudes toward 
the inner experience, and both are important and signifi- 
cant; we have no right to prefer the one to the exclusion 
of the other, or, worst of all, to mix the two in a hap- 
hazard way. Those two attitudes do not start with schol- 
arly psychology. They prevail in our ordinary life and 
are intertwined in our daily intercourse. We may per- 
haps suggest the difference at first in saying that we can 
try to explain mental life and that we can try to under- 
stand mental life. 

If someone asks us a question, our aim is to understand 
what he has in mind. We try to enter into his thought and 
to understand his feeling about it, in order to take an 
attitude toward the question in answering yes or no. If 
we succeed, we feel sure that we have grasped everything 
which is in the questioner's mind. His whole inner experi- 
ence has become clear to us and is completely under- 
stood. Yet exactly the same mental process of the ques- 
tioner might awake in us an entirely different interest. 
Instead of considering the meaning, we might ask our- 
selves what causes these thoughts and feelings. How did 
those ideas enter the mind? Are they perhaps effects of 
some earlier experience ? How do those questions arise in 
consciousness, and from what elements are they composed ? 
Then we look on the other man 's mind as a kind of mental 
mechanism, made up of a variety of mental states, the 
appearance and disappearance of which demand some kind 
of explanation. We may even explain them by brain 



12 PSYCHOLOGY 

processes of which the questioner himself does not know 
anything, or by after-effects of earlier impressions which 
he may have forgotten. 

These two standpoints present themselves in every bit 
of experience. If a man commits a crime, we may be 
interested in understanding the motives and aims in his 
mind, and, if we are to judge his deed, we certainly must 
try to think ourselves into his mind, in order to understand 
his action from the inside. His emotions and his volition, 
his crime, everything is to be understood as the expression 
of his personality. Only through this do we enter into his 
self. Yet we might study the same criminal from an en- 
tirely different point of view ; we might ask ourselves from 
what causes this criminal deed arose in this man. How 
far are his education, his life habits, his surroundings, his 
state of health responsible for the development of these 
impulses ? How far did the fatigue of his brain, or the in- 
fluence of alcohol, or a disease produce the abnormal im- 
pulse? What causes interfered with the mental resistance 
of his will? From what source did the ideas or the mem- 
ories and the hopes or fears arise, and how did they come 
to result in that criminal deed? 

In the most trivial conversations or in the most moment- 
ous situations of life the mind with which v/e are dealing 
may in this way be to us either a self into whose purposes 
we enter, or a bundle of mental states which are linked to- 
gether. In the same act of experience we may change be- 
tween the two standpoints. The crying child may awaken 
our sympathy, and we naturally try to understand his pain, 
or his sorrow. But at the next moment we think how to 
distract his attention, that is, we think how to cause in his 
mind a new process by which the displeasure will become 
inhibited. To do this the child's mind must be looked on 
as a set of connected processes in which the effects which 
will result can be determined beforehand. 

Yet this twofold way of looking into the neighbor's 



THE REALM OF PSYCHOLOGY 13 

mind shows itself no less when we think of our own mental 
life. We go through the world and mingle among men, 
each one always feeling himself as an individual person- 
ality whose feelings and ideas are his real self. Our love 
and hate, our likes and dislikes, our agreeing and disagree- 
ing, our thinking of this and of that, are the acts which 
stand for our personal life. We live in those feelings and 
emotions and thoughts; we ourselves are those inner activ- 
ities. And yet we may consider this same inner life as if 
we were spectators looking on at that procession of inner 
events, observing the happenings in our own consciousness. 
Then we give our attention to the structure of our mem- 
ories and imaginative ideas, perceptions and thoughts, and 
even our feelings and emotions and volitions then lie before 
us like objects of which we become aware. Anyone who 
begins self observation is forced to take just such an atti- 
tude toward his inner life. He watches himself, looks out 
for every bit of sensation, of feeling, which he finds in 
his mind, in order to describe them, and if possible to 
explain them. A greater contrast can hardly be imagined : 
on the one side the stream of life in which our will and 
feeling and thought are to us meaning and expression of 
our self, and on the other side the neutral taking account 
of the processes in our mind as if they were a spectacle 
which we are objectively watching. 

Surely the first standpoint is the more natural one.' If 
you and I talk with each other, I do not only take you as 
such a subject whom I am to understand, but I feel my- 
self as a subject who agrees and disagrees, who likes and 
dislikes what you say, and who wants his own opinion to 
be understood. It is quite improbable that I have reasons 
to watch ni}^ mental states as objects, Avhile we are engaged 
in our conversation. But if I afterward begin to think 
about it, I may ver^^ well call back those ideas and emo- 
tions of mine and make them pass before my inner eye as 
mere mental happenings which come and go like the clouds 



14 PSYCHOLOGY 

and the sunshine and the landscape outside, and I may 
analyze them and observe their elements, their structure, 
their connections and their effects. It is a somewhat arti- 
ficial method : it is artificial like all analysis and dissection. 
It is more naturalto drink the water than to analyze it in 
the laboratory into its chemical elements. But if we want 
to understand what we can expect from the water, we must 
determine its constitution and examine its properties. It 
is indeed a kind of scientific, naturalistic attitude toward 
our inner life, when we begin to treat it like a series of 
objects. But as soon as we want to foresee what effects are 
to be expected and what causes are at work and how the 
parts hang together, we cannot help choosing this artificial 
standpoint. 

Demand for Consistency. — The psychologist has no 
right to indulge in any mixing of the two modes of ap- 
proach. No doubt, it is always easier to be inconsistent, 
and the temptation to such inconsistency is great here. As 
long as the psychologist gives account of the perceptions 
and the memories, the colors and the tones, the smells and 
the noises, it appears so much more convenient to describe 
them as various contents in the mind and to analyze them 
and then to turn to their explanation. On the other hand, 
if he has to give account of feelings and volitions and emo- 
tions, of character and temperament and judgment, it 
seems so much easier to take the other standpoint and to 
speak of their meaning and to interpret their purposes. 
But if we do so we can never reach a consistent and unified 
account of mental life, and that must after all remain the 
goal which the psychologist cannot give up. As long as 
he is to describe and to explain, he cannot acknowledge that 
there is anything in the mind which does not allow such 
description and explanation. He must feel like the nat- 
uralist, who takes it for granted that everything in the 
universe is subordinated to natural laws. Correspondingly, 
if we are to interpret mental life and to understand it 



THE EEALM OF PSYCHOLOGY 15 

in its meaning, then we must do justice to such a demand 
for every function of our mind. Our own personal life and 
that of our friends and our foes then comes in question 
only as an expression of meaning, and everything has to 
be looked on from that point of view. 

In medieval times the astronomers tried to explain some 
movements of the stars by their natural laws, and some 
by the fact that the angels were moving the stars. We 
know to-day that no consistent view of the universe can be 
gained, if we mix two such different accounts. Either 
we interpret the processes of nature religiously as an ex- 
pression of God and his angels, or we explain them through 
causal laws. Either viewpoint will yield us a unified 
aspect of the world,' but we have no right to combine the 
laws and the angels in one scientific picture. The psychol- 
ogist who makes us understand inner life by interpreting 
the meaning and following up the inner purposes, gives 
us indeed a perfectly unified view of man 's mind ; and so 
does the other psychologist who treats mental life as a 
mechanism which is to be described and to be explained as 
a causal system. In other words, we must acknowledge a 
true psychology as complete only if it allows room for two 
different aspects of personal experience, each of which must 
be consistently carried through. Both kinds of psychology 
are justified, if they are carried through with this con- 
sistency. To recognize the difference means to do justice 
to both sides. Life needs both ; science cannot ignore them. 
A complete psychology must deal with the whole mental 
life as a system of mental processes to be explained, and 
must deal in another part with the whole mental life as an 
expression of personality to be understood in its meaning. 
The two parts must supplement each other. 

Causal and Purposive Psychology. — It means very little 
what name we give to the two aspects of psychical experi- 
ence, but it means extremely much to keep them cleanly 
separated and to recognize distinctly the principles which 



16 PSYCHOLOGY 

control them. "We might call the one aspect objective and 
the other subjective. Sometimes the first has also been 
called a psychology of mental states and the other a psy- 
chology of the self. Again a quite characteristic choice 
of titles is to call the first the psychology of the content of 
consciousness and the other the psychology of meaning. 
We might also speak of explanatory psychology as against 
interpretative psychology. Yet we prefer the designation 
which points most directly to the deepest character of the 
contrast, and shall call the one the causal psychology, the 
other the purposive psychology. 

To understand mental life as a system of causes and 
effects is indeed the most significant aim of the one kind 
of study ; and to understand it in its meanings, and that is, 
in its purpose, is the fundamental condition for the other 
kind. Everything else, the special principles and the spe- 
cial methods and the special conceptions, follows from this 
parting of the ways. Every further discussion ought there- 
fore to refer to the one aspect or to the other. Hence 
our introduction to the total study of psychology has here 
reached its end, because from now on we must separate 
the two groups of inquiries, until they finally reach a point 
where they come together again. That meeting point is 
reached in applied psychology which speaks of the prac- 
tical application of mental facts in the service of our hu- 
man purposes. The selection of those purposes is a matter 
of purposive psychology, the mental effects to be used a 
matter of causal psychology. They are thus joined in that 
practical part which comes nearest to real life. But, until 
we reach it, we must be loyal to the chosen one-sidedness 
with which we follow mental life at first only on the one, 
and then only on the other side. 

The programme for this book is thus clear and evident. 
We shall speak first of the causal aspect of the mental 
life, then of the purposive aspect and finally of the prac- 
tical aspect. Both in the causal and in the purposive 



THE KEALM OF PSYCHOLOGY 17 

psychology we shall discuss first the general principles and 
methods, then the individual processes, and finally the so- 
cial processes. It is necessary indeed to keep this plan con- 
stantly before our mind. Then only every detail can be 
understood in its right proportion. Otherwise it would 
be necessary to put before every paragraph of the causal 
psychology a danger signal which would warn the student 
not to take this account as the whole truth, but to remem- 
ber that the purposive aspect of the same mental act is no 
less true and no less significant. But we trust that this is 
not needed. We shall resolve the personality into the ele- 
mentary bits of psychical atoms and shall bring every 
mil act into a closed system of causes and effects. But in 
the purposive part we shall show with the same con- 
sistency the true inner unity of the self and the ultimate 
freedom of the responsible personality. Those two ac- 
counts do not exclude each other; they supplement each 
other, they support each other, they demand each other. 
The last part of the purposive psychology will bring us to 
a height from which this inner harmony of the two aspects 
becomes clear. Then every feeling of contradiction will 
disappear, and we shall be forced to see that causality and 
freedom, complexity and unity, natural laws and ideals 
do not interfere with one another, but can be combined in 
an ultimate view of pulsating reality. 

One of the household instruments of our psychological 
laboratories is the well-known stereoscope, into which two 
fiat pictures of a landscape are put. The left eye sees an 
ordinary photograph of a landscape from the left, the 
right eye the same landscape taken from the right, and 
either gives the incomplete impression of a flat surface. 
But as soon as both pictures are seen with the two eyes 
together, the two one-sided, flat impressions disappear and 
instead of them one lifelike vista of the scene is perceived 
with its depth and plastic fullness. We too have to draw 
at first the one, and then the other picture of man's ex- 



18 PSYCHOLOGY 

perience, each taken from a special standpoint, each re- 
maining one-sided, flat and lifeless. But we shall see, if 
both are grasped together and combined in a higher unity 
of understanding, that they blend into one plastic view of 
personality, with the true depth and fullness of real life. 



BOOK I. CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 



PART I. PRINCIPLES OF CAUSAL 
PSYCHOLOGY 

CHAPTER III 

PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 

Psychological Laws. — The aim of the causal psycholo- 
gist is the explanation of the mental processes. How is 
true explanation possible ? The physicist who seeks expla- 
nations for the occurrences in nature tries to find the proc- 
esses which regularly precede other processes in experience. 
From the regularities which he observes he develops the 
physical laws and reaches through that the first stage of 
explanation. He knows the law that, if an electric cur- 
rent is closed, a certain magnetic phenomenon happens, and, 
if the electric current is broken, the magnetic phenomenon 
stops. The law allows it to be determined beforehand 
whether the magnetic pOwer of the iron will appear or 
not. There seems to be no difficulty for the psychologist 
in observing such regularities also among the processes of 
the mind. We notice often that after one process in con- 
sciousness another process occurs. The taste of candy 
brings with it a certain feeling of pleasure; the taste of 
cod liver oil brings just as regularly a feeling of dis- 
pleasure. Moreover the feeling of pleasure, as soon as it 
has become a process in consciousness, awakes another 
process, namely the will to keep that sensation. The un- 
pleasant feeling stirs up the will to get rid of the im- 
pression. Such regular connections can be found a thou- 
sand times in our daily life, and, if we are interested in 

21 



22 PSYCHOLOGY 

ivatching them in subtler detail, we can observe them under 
«exact conditions. 

No doubt, if we proceed with such observations, we can 
■secure a large number of psychological laws. To mention 
one which we may use as a typical illustration, we may 
think of a law which has been known as long as psycholo- 
gists have studied the human mind, a law formulated by 
the first great psychologist, Aristotle : the law of associa- 
tion. If we ever experience two things together, the ideas 
of the two become linked in such a way that whenever 
the one idea is brought to our consciousness again the other 
idea arises too. Everyone has observed that. We have met 
a man and we have heard his name, and that visual idea 
of his face and that acoustical idea of his name were tied 
together ; the law of association makes it necessary that, if 
we meet the man again, his name comes to our mind, or 
if we hear the name we remember how he looks. From such 
a loose, vague form the psychological observation can 
easily be carried to very exact connections, which can be 
verified only by careful studies. We shall find in the 
course of our work many such psychological laws which 
characterize the regular behavior of our perceptions and 
memories, our feelings and volitions. They are the con- 
densed expressions of frequently observed uniformities in 
the succession of psychical contents. But can they really 
furnish us a true explanation, and are they sufficient for 
the causal understanding of our mind? 

The first fundamental difficulty with an explanation of 
mental life through such psychological laws lies in the 
evident disconnectedness and incompleteness of the ma- 
terial in consciousness. This shows itself in a twofold 
form, on the one side in our perceptions, on the other side 
in the ideas, volitions and higher mental processes. In- 
deed, how could we hope to explain by any observed regu- 
larities in the mental content the appearance of the per- 
ceptive impressions. I hear at this moment the ringing of 



PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 23 

bells, that is, the tone sensation arises in my consciousness. 
If I were to rely on strictly psychological explanation, I 
should have to seek in my own consciousness for causes 
which effected the appearance of this sound impression. 
But nothing in my mind suggested to me the coming of 
this sound. I did not think of bells before, which might 
have produced in my mind the tone sensations. My mind 
was filled with entirely different contents, when suddenly 
these tone sensations of bells broke in. Nothing which 
preceded in my consciousness seems to offer the least foot- 
hold for the explanation of these tone sensations. But the 
same is true, of course, of every visual impression which 
comes to my mind or of every touch, of every word which 
is spoken to me and of every printed line which I read. 
Everything enters into my consciousness as a new content 
for which I cannot possibly seek the causes in the preced- 
ing contents of consciousness, and for which, therefore, any 
explanation through strict psychological laws seems illog- 
ical. 

But the other aspect of the incompleteness is no less 
striking: complex ideas, words, impulses, emotions, 
thoughts arise constantly in our consciousness without any 
preceding contents which could really explain their ap- 
pearance. We try to think of a name, and, while we are 
in the midst of entirely different engagements, the name 
suddenly pops into our head. We were occupied with a 
problem, and, after we were no longer thinking of it, the 
solution appeared over the horizon of our consciousness. A 
melody arises in our mind, a fancy of imagination appears, 
without any noticeable cause, a mood takes control of us, 
we do not know why. But we can go much further. Let 
us think of the case of ordinary speaking. In common 
conversation the words come to our mind, while we are 
speaking them; we are generally not aware of any causes 
in our consciousness which determine the selection of the 
particular words. We hear the question and we give the 



24 PSYCHOLOGY 

answer offhand before we discover in our consciousness any 
ideas which may lead to the reply. It is as if just the con- 
necting links of thought are left out, or, rather, are hidden 
from our conscious awareness. 

This fundamental difficulty has led to two types of 
theories, both of which seek to explain the coming and 
going of the conscious contents by agencies and processes 
which are not in consciousness. They leave the sphere 
of selfobservation in order to supply a connected chain 
of causes and effects. The one puts the responsibility on 
psychical processes which lie outside of consciousness : it is 
a theory of the unconscious mind or of the subconscious. 
The other seeks the explanation not through psychical 
causes at all, but turns to the brain processes of the or- 
ganism, explaining the changes in the mental life indirectly 
by changes in the nervous system. We must examine the 
right and wrong, the value and the limits of both schemes 
of explanation. The unconscious has the first right to be 
considered, as it has the advantage of remaining in the 
world of the psychical. 

The Unconscious. — Mental processes which are not con- 
tained in a consciousness are usually called unconscious. 
But this word is often carelessly used for processes which 
do not really lie outside of consciousness. Especially in 
the study of abnormal mental life we frequently use the 
term unconscious, where we actually mean that the content 
of an experience and the act of experience itself are entirely 
forgotten. The somnambulist who awakes in the morning 
and finds that he wrote a letter during the night, of which 
he no longer knows anything, is said to have written it 
unconsciously. But we have no reason to believe that dur- 
ing the act of writing he was not fully aware of his activ- 
ity. He saw the letter paper as if he were in a normal 
waking state. The abnormal happening consisted rather in 
the fact that this conscious experience left no memory 
traces in his mind. As we are accustomed to remember 



PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 25 

what was in our consciousness, everything which is entirely 
extinguished appears to us as if it never had been in our 
consciousness. We find the same abnormal processes in 
certain mental diseases or in hypnotic states and in all such 
cases we have no right to relegate to the unconscious that 
which has slipped from consciousness and which cannot 
be brought back. 

Again we often say that something was not done con- 
sciously where we really mean that it was not done with a 
full harmonious use of all mental energies. The man 
who is poisoned by a drug or who is in the delirium of 
fever or in a state of drunkenness or in the midst of an 
attack of mental disease may behave without selfcontrol 
and without the regulation by the idea of his own self. 
Hence he may be considered not responsible for his actions. 
We may even say that he has acted without selfconscious- 
ness, but we have no right to say that he was unconscious. 
The content of his consciousness was chaotic, but his ideas 
and emotions and volitions, however disorderly, passed on 
just as much in consciousness as if he were in normal 
health. 

We are here interested only in those mental processes 
which are really not in consciousness at all, and only these 
are covered by our term. Yet it is doubtful whether the 
word unconscious would be the most significant. It too 
easily suggests anything which is not conscious and that 
means that the whole physical universe could be called un- 
conscious too. If we want to separate the unconscious 
stones on the street from the unconscious mental states in 
ourselves, we shall have to call these psychical processes 
subconscious. As the iceberg in the ocean shows only its 
smallest part above the surface of the water while far the 
largest part is below, a small part of our mental contents 
can be found above the surface of consciousness, while 
most of them remain below, subconscious. 

This theory is widespread and popular, because it fits 



26 PSYCHOLOGY 

temptingly into any purpose of explanation. But if we 
approach its detail, we must recognize that it does not fulfill 
its promises and is thoroughly unsatisfactory. The pur- 
pose is to explain the appearance of the contents of con- 
sciousness. Those who want to reach this end through the 
hypothesis of the subconscious believe that they find all the 
necessary requisites in two assumptions. First they 
imagine that all our experiences sink into the subconscious 
when they disappear from consciousness. There they are 
stored up and lie unused until they are brought to con- 
sciousness again. Something reminds me of a street which 
I passed years ago and of a talk which I had on that street 
corner. The picture of the houses, the phrases of our 
talk, come back to me. In order to explain that, I am ex- 
pected to believe that those sights and those words were 
lying somewhere at the bottom of my mind. I never 
thought of them during the years which have passed ; thus 
they surely were not in consciousness. Yet how could I 
bring them back, if they had not lasted in some subcon- 
scious form. The mere lying in the subconscious, however, 
is not enough. Something must have selected them now 
and must have pushed them at this moment from the sub- 
conscious over the threshold into consciousness. There 
must be some activity at work or at least some interplay 
of the ideas ; in short, it is not enough to believe that rem- 
nants of old experiences are kept below consciousness, but 
the theory must demand secondly that all the time activ- 
ities and processes go on in the subconscious, just as in 
our conscious mind. Those subconscious ideas must pro- 
duce new thoughts, must start impulses to action, must 
select the words which we are to speak and must look out 
for everything which is to be done by us, and which is not 
proceeding in the light of our consciousness. We may 
examine these two sides of the theory independently. 

The Subconscious Dispositions. — The first claixn is the 
existence of those mental memory traces. All our school 



PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 27 

knowledge which we can call back, ever^^thing which we 
have seen or heard, tasted or smelt, must linger somewhere 
in that obscure region. Such an assumption is from the 
start utterly fantastic. In consciousness ideas interfere 
with one another, feelings inhibit one another; we cannot 
be happy and miserable at the same time. But in the para- 
dise of the subconscious the lion and the lamb are to lie 
down together. The millions of impressions and joys and 
pains and feelings exist subconsciously together without 
destroying one another. Ultimately such a hopeless theory 
is nothing but a crude materialism. The mental ideas are 
treated as if they were little balls or cubes which can be 
piled up, and this means that the ideas are imagined to 
be like physical things which last. Our inner experience 
demands a very different view. The conscious states are 
processes which take place, and when the process is ended 
it remains no more than the tunes of the piano remain in 
the piano case or the athletic movement in the muscles. 
"VVe can think the same idea always anew, just as we can 
play the same melody on the piano or perform the same 
athletic feat. But we cannot imagine that the tones are 
hidden in the strings of the piano and the muscle move- 
ments kept in store in the limbs. 

Hence it is at least an improvement, if it is claimed that 
not the ideas themselves remain in the suh conscious, hut 
only dispositions for the appearance of the mental proc- 
esses. The mind somehow holds traces of all the French 
words and historical dates which we learned, but these 
traces are not real syllables and sounds but only slum- 
bering dispositions out of which through the activity of the 
mind new copies of the old ideas can be generated. Can 
this really help us? If the appearance of a conscious 
process is dependent upon a subconscious disposition, how 
are we then to explain our perceptions of the outer world ? 
I hear the bells ringing. The sounds enter my conscious- 
ness. I\Iust I suppose that I have a subconscious disposi- 



28 PSYCHOLOGY 

tion for these bell sounds, and even for this new melody of 
the bells which I have never heard before. Of course, then 
I must have such a disposition for everything on earth 
which can enter into the sphere of my senses, I must have 
a disposition for the smell of the chemical substance which 
some chemist may produce to-morrow in his laboratory. 
All those dispositions resulting from my little personal ex- 
periences are then insignificant compared with the trillions 
for all which may possibly become the object of my sense 
perceptions. 

But as soon as we take refuge in such an unlimited 
hypothesis, it becomes entirely useless. If there is in our 
mind a disposition for everything imaginable, it can no 
longer serve as an explanation for the particular idea 
which comes to our mind. Then we must have the dis- 
positions not only for the French words which we learned, 
but also for the Chinese words which someone may teach 
us later. Yet no one would accept such a gigantic appa- 
ratus for the explaining of our sensations. It would seem 
so much more natural that I hear the bells because the 
sound waves of the bells reach my ear and stimulate my 
ear nerve and finally my brain, and that my brain excite- 
ment is the real cause for my hearing the sounds. We are 
practically relying on such a theory all the time. We do 
not feel surprised that even the newest color and taste and 
smell awake impressions in our consciousness, because they 
have somehow stimulated and excited our eye and brain. 
We do not demand a special psychological disposition be- 
sides. At any moment the perceptions of our senses can 
^rise in our consciousness without any subconscious mental 
dispositions, simply through the excitation of our brain. 
Then is it not illogical to require such mental forerunners 
in the case of the memory ideas, instead of seeking here 
too the causes in a brain process, as in the case of the 
perceptions ? 

The Subconscious Operations. — The other function of 



PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 29 

the subconscious was that of the selective activity, of awak- 
ing and stirring up, of inhibiting and suppressing, of link- 
ing the ideas and connecting the thoughts in order to pro- 
duce those results which finally appear in consciousness. 
We know that many a problem is solved in our mind with- 
out our following the process step by step in consciousness. 
We form our decisions, we shape our plans, we get our 
inspirations in processes of which we know consciously 
only the beginning and the end, but all the necessary inter- 
play of ideas and all the linking of motives which evidently 
lie between must have gone on in the subconscious. Hence 
the theory insists in the interest of explanation that exactly 
the same mental processes which go on in full self-conscious 
attention can proceed also in the subconscious underworld. 
As soon as this is granted, it seems as if all difficulties were 
removed. The processes below consciousness offer them- 
selves the more conveniently as no one can know them from 
direct observation and anything can be ascribed to them 
which seems desirable for a neat explanation. The most 
complicated mental operations can easily be attached to 
such an unconscious mind. Just here, however, we are 
working under a complete illusion, which we must dispel. 

In the interest of explanation we postulate that the same 
mental operations can go on subconsciously which we know 
from our conscious experience. But we do so before we 
ask the decisive question, namely, whether even those con- 
scious operations are really able to produce the mental ef- 
fects. It may be that we are unable to explain any mental 
results by those processes which proceed in consciousness. 
In that case it would evidently be absurd to explain them 
by the same processes below consciousness. And just this 
is indeed the case. 

The ideas which follow one anotliicr in consciousness may 
appear in their order thousands of times; and yet the 
mere fact that they occur again and again does not link 
them to real causes and effects. They follow one another, 



30 PSYCHOLOGY 

but no causal necessity binds them together. Take once 
more the case of the association of ideas. The flower I 
see by the roadside brings to my mind its botanical name 
which I learned years ago, and if someone mentions to me 
the name of the flower, that brings to my consciousness 
the visual image of the flower, as I saw it before. I rely 
on that power of my memory, just as I rely on the laws of 
electricity which make the lamp burn when I turn the 
switch. Certainly my memory may not render the service 
at a particular time ; I may have forgotten the name or the 
picture of the flower may have faded away or I may con- 
fuse it with a similar plant. But this does not interfere 
with the working of the association law, any more than 
the laws of electricity are to be given up because my lamp 
may be burnt out or the contact of the switch may have 
become defective. Yet there remains a fundamental dif- 
ference between any such psychological connection and a 
physical one. 

The physicist sees before him the goal of bringing all the 
processes in nature ultimately to mere mechanical move- 
ments of atoms. This alone gives a definite meaning to 
his view of the world. The mere observation of regularities 
is only the starting point for him. What has happened a 
hundred times may be different the hundred and first time. 
He has a right to predict the event for the hundred and 
first time only if he can recognize the necessity of the 
process; and this is reached only if he can bring it down 
to mechanical movements of the smallest particles. Under 
the pressure of such a demand he develops his physical 
theories of ether waves and so on, and splits what he calls 
atoms at one stage into still smaller fragments like the 
electrons, but he can never rest until he sees somehow the 
connection between the mere observed regularity in nature 
and those necessary mechanical movements. The natural 
scientist may be in many fields of physics or chemistry 
still very far from this ideal, but it remains the guiding 



PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 31 

star. He takes it for granted that if he knew the whole 
truth every change in the outer world could be explained 
by a mere change of position of the smallest parts. No 
theories, not even the new ones of the dynamic type, have 
really altered the"se scientific assumptions, as long as the 
theories really aimed toward scientific explanation and not 
to a mere purposive interpretation of nature. On this 
background the scientist has a right to claim that all his 
laws are meant as expressions of causal necessity. 

The psychologist has nothing to offer which is similar. 
He cannot speak of such necessity in the connection of 
psychical facts in consciousness. This is not because psy- 
chology is still too incomplete and too far from its goal, but 
because this cannot possibly be the goal of psychology. 
It lies in the nature of the 'psychical objects that, however 
much regularity we may find in their hehavior, they can 
never he directly linked hy causal necessity. "We may* 
observe that the flower brings us its name or that the 
name brings the picture of the flower, but that mental 
impression of the flower and that mental idea of the name 
are simply two events which follow each other, while we 
have not the slightest insight into a mental mechanism 
which could be supposed to link them. The whole play 
of connection in the physical world is conceivable, because 
every bit of those physical objects remains and changes 
only its place. The candle may disappear when it burns 
down, but every atom of it can still be traced in the atmo- 
sphere. Of the mental objects the opposite is true. The 
single mental experience is an act which is going on but 
which does not last, which cannot be found again any- 
where in the mental universe. We may have a thousand 
times new ideas of the same object, but the same idea 
cannot come back a second time. The same hope, the 
same anger, the same desire, the same decision cannot be 
brought to consciousness once more. If we feel and will 
with the same intent, we must go through the performance 



32 PSYCHOLOGY 

anew; we cannot revive tlie withered will of yesterday, 
and, where nothing lasts, we cannot conceive a really neces- 
sary connection. 

This is not accidental; it cannot be otherwise. This whole 
splitting of our experiences into physical things and into men- 
tal things is artificial and is not suggested by immediate ex- 
perience. We do not find the flower in the field and beside that 
our perception of the flower in our mind. The flower which 
we pick there is neither that complex of atoms of which the 
physicist speaks nor that content of consciousness of which 
the psychologist speaks. It is both in one, and it is in the 
interest of explaining the world that we divide that impression 
into two parts, the physical and the mental object. We call 
physical the object in so far as it can be grasped in ever new 
experiences; it is a physical object in so far as everyone can 
look at it, and as we ourselves can return to it ever anew. On 
the other hand, we call the object mental in so far as it is given 
only in the one act of our personal awareness. This then in- 
volves that the physical object lasts and that its parts can never 
disappear from the universe, and that the psychical object can 
never exist beyond that one act of immediate awareness and 
that it can never reappear. The physical objects, accordingly, 
change only their positions and their movements can be traced 
through their necessary paths, because each particle lasts. In 
consciousness no mental object can be followed up, because it 
can never last; it has given itself out in the act in which it 
appears in consciousness. Hence it would be meaningless to 
seek a true causal connection between two succeeding mental 
objects, however often we may observe their succession. 

But if we must acknowledge that the psychical objects 
which we know in consciousness cannot furnish us with 
any understanding of causal connection, it is evident that 
the subconscious mental objects would not do it either. 
We wanted to introduce the hypothesis that there are sub- 
conscious ideas exclusively for the purpose of furnishing 
a causal explanation for the mental interplay. The as- 



PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION 33 

sumption was that those subconscious mental states might 
then produce the ,*^.ame effects as the conscious states. But 
as we see now that the conscious states themselves are unfit 
for a real explanation of causes and effects, it would be 
utterly useless to duplicate them in the subconscious. Even 
if such subconscious ideas and feelings and volitions ex- 
isted, they could not contribute anything to the explana- 
tion: they would again simply follow one another without 
our understanding why they come and go. Such a hy- 
pothesis would be entirely useless. We must acknowledge 
that there is no causal necessity which directly links the 
changes in the world of mental objects. We know such 
necessity only in the physical world. 

Such a conclusion must not be misunderstood. It would 
be absurd to misinterpret it as if it were meant to say that 
there cannot be necessity in our inner life. On the con- 
trary, all our thinking and feeling and doing are bound 
together by ties of inner necessity. If we think logically, 
the premises of our thoughts bind us in forming our 
conclusions. Our pledge binds our will in its actions. But 
this inner necessity which gives real meaning to our whole 
life and in which our duties and obligations lie, refers 
to the purposive aspect of our inner experience. If we 
take our thoughts and wills in their meaning, then, of 
course, they are firmly linked together. As soon as we 
come to the discussion of the purposive psychology, we 
shall see that everything there is controlled by this inner 
necessity. But here we are in the midst of the discussion 
of causal psychology in which the ideas and volitions are 
not looked on as purposes which we interpret, but as 
objects which we find in consciousness and which we want 
to describe and to explain. And only for this onesided 
objective aspect the last word must be that there is no 
direct causal connection possible and that it cannot be 
introduced by the construction of a subconscious mental 
machinery. 



CHAPTER IV 
PSYCHOPHYSICAL EXPLANATION 

Connection of Mind and Brain.— We have seen that a 
real insight into the necessary connections of mental 
states qannot be gained and can never be hoped for from 
mental processes alone, whether conscious or subconscious. 
Only when we have recognized this fundamental difficulty 
in the efforts for psychological explanation can we un- 
derstand the way which modem psychology has taken so 
successfully. It starts from the commonsense experience 
that our light and sound impressions depend upon the 
light and sound in the surrounding physical world. "We 
find a succession of tones in our consciousness, because 
someone plays the piano. But everyone knows too that 
the mere existence of the physical tones or of the colored 
lights is in itself not sufficient to awake the sound or tho 
red or the green in our consciousness. Those processes 
in the outer world, the vibrations of the string in tho 
piano, or the light vibrations of the painting, must reach 
our sense organs, our ear or eye. If the eyelid is closed, 
the colors do not produce color sensations. 

Scientific observations, however, easily lead beyond 
this matter of course knowledge. The scientist knows that 
it is not enough for the light rays to reach the eye, but 
that the nerve which connects the eye with the brain must 
be intact too. If it is cut or destroyed by disease, the 
light which falls into the eye cannot awake the light sen- 
sations in consciousness. Moreover even if the nerve is 
undisturbed, it is essential that those brain parts to which 

34 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL EXPLANATION 35 

the nerve leads be in working order. If by a hemorrhage 
in the rear part of the brain the so-called optical centers 
are made ineffective, the patient becomes blind. Hence the 
true connection between the physical and the mental event 
cannot be established between the light sensation and the 
light ray; it exists rather between light sensation and 
the brain process which is produced through the action of 
the eye under the stimulation of the light. Taste and 
smell, pressure of weight and contact and temperature must 
stimulate the sense organs first and then the nerve and 
finally the brain for sweet or sour, touch or warmth to 
be felt. Even if the physical process occurs in our own 
body, if a muscle is swollen or a tooth is revolting, the 
ache cannot be felt unless the nerve can conduct the irri- 
tation to the brain. 

But it seems no less a matter of course that mind and 
body are connected wherever an action is performed. I 
have the will to grasp for the book before me and obedient- 
ly my arm performs the movement. The muscles contract, 
the whole physical apparatus comes into motion through 
the preceding mental process of volition. The same holds 
true where no special will act arouses the muscles. If a 
thought is in my mind and it discharges itself in appro- 
priate words, those words are first of all movements of 
lips and tongue and vocal chords and chest, physical proc- 
esses which have followed the mental experience. The 
ideas and feelings may also be the starting points for 
other bodily changes. They may make a man blush as 
large groups of blood-vessels become dilated, or he may 
become pale because the blood-vessels are contracted, or 
he may cry because the tear gland is working, or his 
muscles may tremble, or his skin may perspire ; his whole 
organism may resound with physical excitement which 
some words may have stirred up. The observations of the 
scientist here too link the changes which occur in the skin 
and the muscles and the glands and the blood-vessels with 



36 PSYCHOLOGY 

the activities of the brain. The bodily effects of the inner 
states do not take place, if the nerves which lead from 
the brain to these peripheral organs of the body are de- 
stroyed. If we press the movement nerve of the upper 
arm until it becomes inactive, our will is unable to move 
the fingers. But the nerve is again only the transmitter; 
the real beginning of the process lies in the brain. If the 
breaking of a blood-vessel has destroyed a certain part of 
the brain, the patient is paralyzed, that is, his mental 
will can no longer move his arm or his leg. 

Yet this group of facts seems very different from the first 
group, the perceptions. There we found that a brain excitement 
is the condition under which our sensations of color or sound 
or taste or pain arise in consciousness : an immediate co- 
incidence of brain action and conscious experience. Here we 
notice only that some kind of brain activity has to start our 
will actions or our emotional responses, but we have in that no 
sign that the will or the emotion itself is accompanied by a 
brain process. It may be that the will or the feeling or the 
thoughts go on as psychical events in consciousness, without 
any parallel action in the brain and that they only end with 
playing somewhat on a brain center which realizes the activity 
in the nerves and muscles. 

But the observation of effects is at this point naturally sup- 
plemented by theoretical reasoning. Let us look at the situa- 
tion from the standpoint of the natural scientist. We find that 
muscles are contracted, that glands are producing secretions, that 
the blood circulation of the body is changed. These are evidently 
physical processes which the scientist must explain by the same 
principles by which he explains every other event in the physical 
universe. He takes it for granted that every movement of mole- 
cules is the effect of physical causes. If the chain of physical 
causes and effects were interrupted anywhere, and an atom 
changed its direction of movement without a foregoing physical 
cause, the event would be to him a miracle, a mystery, a de- 
struction of natural science. He knows that not all causes are 
known to him and that especially in the world of the living 
organisms many processes are still unexplained to-day, but he can 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL EXPLANATION 37 

never give up the assumption that a fuller knowledge would 
be able to explain them. This is the real foundation of modem 
science; it is the ideal which guides every effort of the scientist 
and he calls scientific truth that which brings him nearer to 
this ideal. He must go far beyond mere observations in order 
to fulfill this demand of thought. But he can never satisfy him- 
self with the easy solution that at this or at that point an 
exception is to be admitted and an effect is to be recognized 
without a preceding physical cause. Where he does not dis- 
cover the cause, he acknowledges an unsolved problem. 

From such a strictly naturalistic point of view the brain 
process which starts the movement of our fingers or our lips 
cannot possibly be without foregoing physical causes. The 
scientist cannot call it an explanation, if he simply refers this 
brain excitement to the intruding of a mental will or a mental 
idea. In the closed system of mechanical causes the power of 
a mental idea to change the brain excitements would be as much 
of a miracle as if our idea changed the course of the moon. The 
true physical causes, accordingly, must be a brain process which 
coincides with those emotions or ideas or volitions. Only then 
can the great postulate of modern science, the conservation of 
physical energy, be satisfied by the actions in the organism. The 
scientific theory thus leads to the conclusion that all the mental 
states which seem to produce actions of the body are them- 
selves accompanied by brain excitements. Hence the two large 
groups of facts which we considered, the stimulations of the 
sense organs and the movements of the body, thus after all lead 
to the same interpretation: in both cases the mental states, the 
sensation or the volition, need as a counterpart a certain brain 
occurrence. 



We may turn to a third group of facts. If the tempera- 
ture of the blood is raised in fever, the mental processes 
become confused : if hashish is smoked, the mind wanders 
to paradise. A cup of tea may make us sociable, a few 
glasses of wine may give us a new mental optimism and 
exuberance, a dose of bromide may annihilate the irrita- 
tion of our mind. If we inhale ether, or if arteries in our 



38 PSYCHOLOGY 

neck are pressed so that the brain is insufficiently sup- 
plied with blood, the whole content of consciousness fades 
away. A blow on the head may wipe out the memory of 
the preceding hours; a tumor in the brain may completely 
change the personality; a disease in certain convolutions 
in the brain brings with it the loss of the power of speech ; 
inhibition in the growth of the brain involves on the mental 
side feeblemindedness and idiocy. A pathological degen- 
eration of certain groups of brain cells is accompanied by 
demented states. 

We might point to still a fourth group of facts which 
seems to indicate the intimate relation between the brain 
and the mental processes. The comparative anatomist 
shows us that the development of the central nervous 
system in the kingdom of animals goes parallel with the 
development of the mental functions. Any special func- 
tion of the mind may in certain animal groups have reached 
an unusual height, and then we see certain parts of the 
brain correspondingly developed. The dog has a keener 
sense of smell than man : the part of the brain which is in 
direct connection with the nerves of the nose is much 
bulkier in the dog's brain than in the human organism. 
The physiologist adds to these comparative observations 
his experimental results. He can demonstrate that electric 
stimulations of definite spots on the surface of a dog's 
brain produce movements of barking and whining, or 
movements of the front legs or of the tail. On the 
other hand the dog becomes unable to fulfill the mental 
impulses if certain definite parts of his brain are destroyed. 
Physiologists may show, from the monkey down to the 
pigeon, to the frog, to the ant, to the worm, how the be- 
havior of animals is changed as soon as certain groups of 
nervous elements are extirpated. Of course the animal can- 
not furnish us with selfobservations. The dog may bark 
or whine: and yet be a mere physical machine, without 
consciousness. "We are therefore on safer ground, if we 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL EXPLANATION 39 

confine ourselves at first to the study of human beings, 
where both the physical outside event and the psychical 
inner event are observable and are the objects of com- 
munications. Even the diseased mind or the child 's mind 
furnishes us with such selfobservational material. The 
patient can tell us what abnormal emotions oppress his 
mind, and the child can report to us what he sees and 
hears. 

Psychophysical Parallelism. — We have shown that man's 
perceptions and memories, volitions and impulses, occur 
together wdth brain excitements. This, however, is cer- 
tainly not a proof that every mental event is correlated 
with nervous processes. There may be some act of atten- 
tion, some subtle feeling, some sudden decision, some flight 
of imagination, which is independent of any brain action. 
Here is the point where we must return to our previous 
argument. "We saw, when we discussed the possible 
psychological explanations, that the appearance of a mental 
content can never be explained by any foregoing mental 
state. It lies in the nature of the psychical objects that 
they cannot be linked directly as causes and effects. Yet 
we acknowledged that the chief aim of objective psychology 
is to understand the coming and going of the mental states 
as necessary. One way to gain such an ultimate explana- 
tion of all mental events is evidently open. The psycholo- 
gist has only to generalize what he has found out about 
the impressions and volitions and the effects of drugs and 
of brain diseases. He has to go forward to the general 
postulate that every single mental state he understood as 
the accompaniment of a special brain process. This is 
exactly the assumption upon which the scientific causal 
psychology of to-day depends. 

It would be very superficial to deny that such an as- 
sumption goes beyond what is at present the result of 
actual observation. It is ultimately a postulate. But every 
science begins with postulates and only those statements 



40 PSYCHOLOGY 

which fulfill them have the dignity of truth in the midst 
of that scientific realm. The astronomer knows that he 
has not understood a movement of the stars until he has 
found the causes : he presupposes that no star moves simply 
by magic power and that nowhere in the astronomic 
universe the chain of causality is broken. In the same way 
the psychologist who aims toward explanation of psychical 
states assumes that every mental state is an accompani- 
ment of a physical brain process. Only when such a frame- 
work of theory is built up by a general postulate can 
those observations of the laboratory, of the clinic, and of 
daily life, find their right setting. We m^y still be unable 
to point to the special brain process which lies at the bot- 
tom of a particular mental state: and yet, if the assump- 
tion is accepted, we know beforehand that there is no 
shadow of an idea, no fringe of a feeling, no suggestion of 
a desire which does not correspond to definite processes 
in the brain. The details may and must be material for 
diverging opinions, but the conflict of such hypothetic 
theories has nothing to do with the certainties of the un- 
derlying conviction that, if we knew the whole truth, we 
should recognize every single mental happening as parallel 
to a physical process in the nervous system. 

It is indeed evident that such an assumption is perfectly 
sufficient to fulfill our demand. If every mental element 
is somehow bound together with a definite process in a 
particular brain part, the physical interplay of the brain 
processes can now be used to explain the coming and going 
of these mental states. We saw that the physical world 
to which the brain and all its millions of nerve cells belong 
is conceived as controlled by causality. One brain process 
must lead to the next brain process. If the first is accom- 
panied by one mental state, the second by another mental 
state, we can explain indirectly why the one psychical 
event is succeeded by the other. If hearing the name of 
our friend brings back to our mind the memory image of 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL EXPLANATION 41 

his face, no causal necessity binds that word impression 
and this face impression in our mind. But if that word 
impression is linked with one brain excitement and that 
face impression with another, and if we can show that 
by phj^sical laws the first brain state must be followed 
by the other brain state, we explain indirectly why the 
hearing of the name must stir up the seeing of the face. 

Of course the explanation must not be sought in a wrong 
direction. Such a theory does not in the least explain to 
us why certain brain excitements are accompanied by the 
sensations of blue or red or sour or salt. But that is not 
the aim of our explanatory theory. The brain process is 
not to figure as the cause of the sensation, nor the sensa- 
tion as the cause of the brain process. The various ele- 
ments from which our content of consciousness is built up 
are ultimate facts for the objective psychologist. Sour is 
sour and salt is salt : the difference between those two men- 
tal states is something which must be accepted and can 
never be explained by the brain processes. The excite- 
ment in the nervous system and the content in the con- 
sciousness are entirely incomparable, and it would not con- 
tribute anything to our understanding, if we called the 
one the cause of the other. 

The real aim of the theory is entirely different. We are 
to explain ivhy these sensations or feelings or volitions 
arise and disappear in a certain order in spite of the fact 
that no direct connections exist among them. AYe do not 
want to explain that a sensation a or a sensation h exists, 
but we want to explain and must explain why the sensation 
a is followed by the sensation h. We do that in showing 
that sensation a is always present when the brain process 
A occurs, and that sensation h is always present when the 
brain process B is going on. Between A and 5 is a true 
causal connection. If A precedes, B must necessarily fol- 
low, and this brings us to an indirect understanding of 
why sensation a is necessarily succeeded by sensation b. 



42 PSYCHOLOGY 

As soon as we recognize clearly the real aim of such a 
theory, it becomes insignificant to us what kind of a meta- 
phor we use to present it to popular imagination. A 
favorite term for it is '^psychophysical parallelism." The 
comparison with two parallel lines suggests indeed very 
well that every change on the psychical side must corre- 
spond to a change on the physical. Yet we must not forget 
that this relation is not reversible. Most of the brain proc- 
esses are not accompanied by psychical states at all. If 
we call those processes in the nervous system which have 
their psychical eccompaniment ''psychophysical proc- 
esses," we certainly have no right to consider the psycho- 
physical processes an uninterrupted chain. Purely physi- 
cal processes lie between them. Of the two parallel lines 
which the metaphor suggests, only one, the physical, is con- 
tinuous, while the other would have to be drawn as a 
broken line, which often exists only in single dots. 

The theoretical discussion has to end with this general 
postulate of parallelism. How it can be fulfilled, which 
mental states are to be correlated to which brain proc- 
esses, and which laws control them is not to be deduced 
from theory, but from the detailed study of facts. The 
further elaboration of the psychophysical system thus be- 
longs to the special part. But the whole special part has 
to be built up on this foundation. It would be an illusion 
to fancy that any observations could alter the postulate 
with which we start. It is the assumption by which causal 
psychology is possible at all. Every observed fact must 
be reconstructed until it can be inclosed within the general 
frame of the psychophysical theory. 



CHAPTER Y 
SCOPE AND METHODS OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 

The Subdivisions of Psychology. — Wherever mental life 
exists, it must be possible to take the objective point of 
view toward it and to consider it as a content of an indi- 
vidual consciousness. As such, it is material for the de- 
scription and explanation. Hence the realm of causal 
psycholog>^ is as wide as that of mental life. Where the 
furthest boundary of this realm lies may seem debatable. 
There is only one test for the existence of consciousness, 
namely, our subjective, practical acknowledgment. If 
someone acknowledges the reality of inner attitudes in the 
spider, but not in the jellyfish, we have no objective 
method to prove that the mental life begins at another 
stage. Not a few feel inclined to extend the realm even 
further down and to acknowledge mental life in the re- 
actions of certain plants when they turn toward the light 
or respond to contact. Very little depends upon such shift- 
ing of the lower limit ; we certainly all agree that from the 
insects upward to the leaders of mankind we have a world 
of mental life in which many different degrees of men- 
tal development and mental complexity can be found. 
A real comparison with the lower forms of mental life 
does not lie in our compass. AYe shall emphasize the bio- 
logical aspect and the continuity of the development, but 
the interest in man's mind is our predominant issue. 

If we are to draw one decisive frontier line between two 
large groups in human psychologj^ it ought to be between 
the mental life of the individuals and that of the social 

43 



U PSYCHOLOGY 

groups. Of course, there is no mental process in the social 
group which is not contained in individual minds. The 
inspirations and impulses and ideas of a nation are, as 
material for causal psychology, only contents of conscious- 
ness in millions of individual persons. And yet the 
psychologist has good reasons to ackliowledge the significant 
difference. The circle of those who are mentally combined 
in society may be large or small, may be a state or merely 
a family: in any case the combination of such individual 
cerebral systems is far more than a mere summation of 
the single members. New forms of psychophysical life and 
new results arise from the mutual influence. Here really 
a new kind of psychological experiences is found and new 
groups of psychological interests are touched. 

We shall accordingly divide the causal psychology into 
individual and social psychology. At one point the two 
fields overlap. The large group of interesting facts which 
refer to the individual differences of men may just as well 
be treated in the one as in the other department. If we 
study individual psychology, we are led from the simple 
states to those most complex formations which constitute 
the personal individuality. The end point of individual 
psychology is therefore the observation of the individuals 
in their differences. But this is exactly the starting point 
for the social psychologist. Society might exist through 
the combination of individuals who are all alike. But the 
society which experience really shows us receives its mani- 
foldness and its complexity above all from the great va- 
riety of persons who enter into it. Society is a com- 
bination of unlike individuals, and to consider the in- 
dividual as a member of society means first of all to char- 
acterize him in his difference from the other members. For 
this reason we shall often point to personal differences 
in the discussion of individual psychology, but the real 
study of personal variations will be the introductory chap- 
ter of our social psychology. The same double function is 



SCOPE AND METHODS OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 45 

characteristic of child psycholo^ and abnormal psychol- 
ogy. We shall refer to the mental facts of childhood and 
of disease in discussing the mind of the individual, but 
we shall consider them chiefly when we deal with the hu- 
man differences in social psychology. 

All the other usual groupings of psychological facts refer 
to other aspects. The discrimination, for instance, of edu- 
cational psychology, legal psychology, medical psychology, 
industrial psychology, refers to the standpoint of the prac- 
tical psychologist, which will interest us in the last part 
of the book. On the other hand, if we speak of experi- 
mental psychology, physiological psychology, comparative 
psychology and so on, we do not characterize different 
groups of material, but different methods by which this 
material is to be mastered. 

To be sure the term physiological psychology can mean not 
only psychology as studied by physiological methods, but also 
psychology as an account of mental states in their relation to 
physiological brain processes. To us this is not a special part of 
causal psychology, inasmuch as we have convinced ourselves 
that we cannot have psychological explanation at all, if we do 
not consider every psychical process as part of the psycho- 
cerebral correlation. We may have to deal with individual 
or with social psychology, with animal or with human psychol- 
ogy, with child psychology or with abnormal psychology: in 
every case we deal with physiological psychology, even if we often 
abstract from the physiological aspect. 

A more dangerous characterization of psychology is pro- 
posed by the too frequently used term functional psychology. 
The word is so easily misleading, because it has at least two 
entirely different meanings. The difference becomes clear through 
the contrast to structural psychology. The structure of the 
mind and the functions of the mind are related to each other 
as the anatomy of a bodily organ is related to its physiology. 
The one has a static, the other a dynamic, character. Structural 
psychology describes that which can be found in conscious- 
ness at a given instant, and functional psychology shows how 



46 PSYCHOLOGY 

successive mental states are parts of a process which leads to cer- 
tain ends. The one takes a cross-section of the stream, and the 
other follows the stream itself. 

If we interpret the meaning of structural and functional 
psychology in this way, it is clear that they belong intimately 
together. The functional aspect is then not in the least contra- 
dictory to the structural. They supplement each other, and while 
we discuss the function, we never forget that it is described 
in constant reference to the structure. Both are essential parts 
of causal psychology. But the temi functional is just as often 
used with an entirely different meaning. The function is then 
no longer a series of describable objective states analogous to 
the function of a bodily organ. But it is the mental act itself 
in its purposiveness, as it is experienced in the attitude of the 
self. Functional psychology is then entirely removed from the 
world of describable objects and understood as an account of 
those functions in the personality which point beyond them- 
selves and are felt as deeds of the subject. In short, it is the 
psychology which we call purposive. If the word functional 
is used in this sense, it does indeed stand in contrast to struc- 
tural psychology and the latter term is then usually expanded so 
far that it covers the whole ground of causal psychology, in- 
cluding the structural account of mental functions. 

In order to evade the difficulties of this double meaning, we 
shall avoid this too popular phrase altogether. It has greatly 
hindered the mutual understanding in modern psychology. This, 
however, in no way means that we shall neglect either of the two 
different accounts of functional psychology. As far as it is the 
same as our purposive psychology we shall present its claims 
in full detail, as soon as we have ended the discussion of causal 
psychology. On the other hand as far as it means the dynamic 
aspect in the midst of causal psychology, we shall certainly do 
the fullest justice to it as it is only the natural consequence of 
the theory of psychophysical parallelism which we have ac- 
cepted. If the mental states are understood as accompaniments 
of brain processes, they are completely linked with the bodily 
life of the organism and through it with the whole psycho- 
physical development. This whole psychocerebral process will 
appear to us as the central part of that complex biological func- 



SCOPE AND METHODS OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 47 

tion by which the individual adjusts himself usefully to his sur- 
roundings. The psychophysical process thus enters into the sys- 
tem of organic reactions, which can never be understood if they 
are not related to their useful effects. Hence we are everywhere 
obliged to emphasize the functional aspect in the midst of causal 
psychology, and any effort to confine the work to a mere struc- 
tural account would leave out the most important and the most 
interesting feature. 

Selfobservation. — If we were to divide the whole 
realm of causal psychology from the point of view of the 
various methods, the fundamental division ought to lie be- 
tween the psychology based on selfobservation and the 
psychology based on the observation of others. The di- 
vision line must not be misunderstood. The material 
which the psychologist secures by the method of selfobserva- 
tion is certainly not confined to that which he finds in 
his own personal consciousness. All the mental experiences 
which fellow-workers observe in themselves and report to 
him count for him just as much as if he had observed 
them in his own mind. As soon as we are in the midst of 
psychological work, we cannot go back to philosophical 
doubts concerning the reality of the fellow 's mind ; we take 
it for granted that he can observe his content of conscious- 
ness as well as we observe our own. If somebody else 
describes to me his afterimages or his headache, I accept 
it as material gained by the introspective method just as 
if I myself observed the colors or the ache. The essential 
point is not whether I or someone else experiences it, but 
whether the observer and the observed are the same person, 
or not. If the child simply cries and laughs, he experiences 
the feelings, but I observe them ; the case is therefore not 
one of selfobservation. And if the melancholic patient 
shows to me that he is brooding on sad ideas, again I am 
the observer and he is the observed. If we call the psycho- 
logical observation which is not introspective an indirect 
observation, every study of the mental life of animals or of 



48 PSYCHOLOGY 

infants or of seriously diseased persons will be mostly in- 
direct. Moreover we may carry on indirect observations 
on any one of our neighbors who on another occasion may 
furnish us with direct observational results. The one easily 
shades off into the other. The child may describe his inner 
experiences, and we gain through this introspective ac- 
counts; and yet we may at the same time observe the 
child's behavior and draw indirect conclusions as to his 
inner states, which may be very different from his own 
reports. 

Selfobservation or introspection is certainly the funda- 
mental method. Yet we cannot deny that it is surrounded 
with serious difficulties. They can be found in various 
directions. The method of introspection has often been de- 
nounced because it is an activity which goes on in the 
same mind in which the processes occur which are to be 
observed. As all activities in our mind influence one an- 
other, it is to be feared that this effort to observe the inner 
changes often destroys its object. There is an element of 
truth in this. If a poem has filled our mind with a subtle, 
delicate feeling tone, and suddenly our scientific effort of 
selfobservation breaks in so as to fixate those shades of feel- 
ing, the chances are great that the whole affection may 
evaporate, because it was disturbed by the entirely dif- 
ferent mental setting. 

If we are depressed or angry or enthusiastic for men 
or events, we are hardly able to turn our introspective 
attention on these inner excitements, and if we force our 
will to introspecting, the enthusiasm or the anger will be 
inhibited. But we can well combine the will to observe 
with the undisturbed experience of a perceptive impres- 
sion or of a memory image or of imaginative experiences or 
even of a thought. Moreover the emotional and volitional 
excitement which does not allow a neutral spectator on the 
fence of our consciousness may be brought back by a later 
act of memory, and we may observe and analyze by intro- 



SCOPE AND METHODS OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 49 

spection to-day the emotional excitement of yesterday. 
Above all the ability to live through a mental experience in 
its original freshness and yet to take inner snapshots of it 
may be strongly developed by training. Anyone interested 
in psychological analysis can acquire a certain skill in com- 
bining the attitude of observing with the practical life at- 
titudes, just as we can learn to perform two different 
movements with the two hands without mutual interference. 

Even if our self observation is careful and backed by 
knowledge of the bodily processes, it is evident that it 
must be confined to those chance experiences which the 
stream of life bears to our shore. Every individual ex- 
perience is narrowly limited, and if we observe only what 
the accidents of the day bring into our sphere, our ma- 
terial will be scanty and insufficient for a systematic study 
of mental possibilities. Many selfobservers may bring to- 
gether the outcome of their introspection; yet the results 
must be haphazard as long as they are confined to that 
which presents itself to them by chance. Worst of all, 
these results must be extremely vague and rough. Really 
careful and subtle discrimination is hardly possible, and 
the comparison of the effects of different conditions can- 
not be expected, if the conditions themselves are not under 
control. Unaided selfobservation, therefore, appeared a 
satisfactory method in the history of human thought, 
only as long as psychology was essentially a speculation 
about the human soul. The vague general impressions 
which the thinker received from the working of his will 
or emotion or memory were sufficient as starting points 
for the soul philosophy which did not have to be a science 
of experience. 

But since the psychologist has turned into the new path, 
and like the naturalist aims toward the goal of scientific 
description and explanation, the merely occasional glances 
at his own mental life can no longer satisfy the student 
of the mind. He must on the one side supplement the self- 



50 PSYCHOLOGY 

observation by the observation of others whose mental ex- 
periences are different from his own, and on the other 
side he must bring selfobservation itself under carefully 
controlled conditions and make it independent of the hap- 
hazard events of the day. But however desirable such ex- 
pansion of method is, and however necessary for every 
serious study, it certainly cannot mean a disregard of the 
introspective method. Those observations of others always 
need interpretation in the light of selfobservation, and all 
those exact and subtle means for the analysis of our own 
mental life remain, after all, only refinements of self- 
observation. Even the work of the psychological labora- 
tory, in which the experiment controls the mental ex- 
perience, is in no way opposed to selfobservation: on the 
contrary, it is only a better and more systematic selfob- 
servation, adjusted to the higher scientific demands. 

Indirect Observation. — We may turn first to the efforts 
to extend the observation beyond our own mental life. 
Introspection is direct observation. Therefore we must 
now ask: how does the psychologist supplement it by in- 
direct observation? We presuppose at first that this in- 
direct study proceeds under the natural conditions of life 
without artificial interference. The characteristic feature 
then is that the observer and the observed are no longer 
the same person. It is clear that no one will turn to the 
stranger whom he must observe from without in order to 
find that which he can find in himself. Yet we saw from 
the start that the effort to observe, especially subtle or 
strong emotions, may interfere with the mental states 
themselves. Hence we naturally turn to the watching of 
fellow-men if we want to trace the undisturbed develop- 
ment, and particularly the expression, of feelings and emo- 
tions, impulses and volitions. 

But the chief value lies in the study of those cases in 
which the mental life is different from our own. The study 
of the mental abnormities, for instance, may be treated not 



SCOPE AND METHODS OP CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 51 

as a department with special objects, but as a scientific 
method needed to discover the subtler interplay of the nor- 
mal mental functions. The diseased mind is composed of 
the same elements as the normal mind : only their propor- 
tion is changed. There is too much or too little of one 
or another mental feature. To observe the distorted mind 
therefore helps us in the understanding of the normal har- 
mony and proportion, as a caricature may help us to rec- 
ognize the proper interrelations between the features of 
the face. The study of the abnormal is in this case not 
controlled by the interest in the traits of the disturbed 
mind, but in their value for the analysis of the normal 
mind. In the same way child psychology may serve as 
a method. We compare the consciousness of the adult with 
the simpler and simpler forms in the mind of children ; we 
may trace the ideas of space and time and number, or 
the ideas of one's own personality or the ideas of fellow- 
beings and similar highly complex structures in our mind 
down to the elementary forms in youth, in childhood and 
in infancy, and understand their composition through the 
comparison. The study of different species or of different 
races, of different ages or of different pathological varia- 
tions is indirect in so far as the observer is not the ob- 
served, but it brings at least the organism into the field 
of direct observation. We can go still a step further and 
gather mental material from individuals who do not come 
into contact with us at all. 

We have this in the case of statistical results, which, 
especially in the form of the so-called moral statistics re- 
ferring to occupations and vocations, crimes and sui- 
cides, marriages and divorces, education and religion, and 
many other results of psychical motives in the national 
body, are important for the study of social psychology. 
Another line of study is opened if we turn to the archives 
of history. The records of the past, with their accounts 
of unusual minds, heroes or artists, martyrs or criminals, 



52 PSYCHOLOGY 

all speak of mental structures and mental functions which 
are sufficiently different from the routine mind to attract 
the interest of the psychologist. 

This again must be supplemented by the study of the 
objective products of minds: it may be the work of indi- 
viduals, such as an artistic or scholarly or religious or 
political creation ; it may be the achievement of the masses, 
such as languages or laws or customs or policies or 
religions. They all reflect light on the mental mechanism 
which brought them into existence. We can study the dif- 
ferences of minds in studying the differences, between the 
works of architecture which old India or Egypt or Assyria 
or Greece or Rome have left to posterity ; and the changes 
of the historic languages can be understood as the prod- 
ucts of simple psychophysiological processes, which repeat 
themselves in millions of individuals. We might even take 
a last step and acknowledge that the poet also furnishes 
us with material which allows observation of mental proc- 
esses. The persons of his epic and dramatic works are 
not real, and he himself is not a causal psychologist, as 
he creates minds, but does not describe and explain them. 
But if we usually call a great poet like Shakespeare a 
great psychologist, we mean that his imagination has 
created individuals whose mental acts are so lifelike and 
internally true that the psychologist can substitute them 
in his studies for real personalities. 

Experimental Psychology. — Thus direct and indirect 
observation combined can bring an abundance of material 
from the marketplaces of life to the workroom of the 
psychologist ; and yet of this indirect study it may be said, 
as we had to say about the direct introspection, that true 
thoroughness and exactitude cannot be reached as long as 
everything is left to the chance offerings of nature. The 
chemist and the physicist do not leave it to the current 
of natural events to bring up the phenomena which de- 
serve scientific interest. They build their laboratories and 



SCOPE AND METHODS OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 53 

produce there artificially conditions under which the ob- 
servations can be repeated in ever-new forms and under 
complete control of the factors which enter into the event. 
The experiment of the naturalist is indeed nothing but the 
observation of the physical or chemical processes under 
conditions which are artificially introduced for the pur- 
poses of the observation. The psychologist too can hope 
for a perfection of direct and indirect observation only if 
he introduces experimental methods. In the persistent 
effort to make use of the experiment for the study of 
causal psychology lies the most characteristic feature of 
the psychology of the last decades. 

This was the decidedly new turn on account of which 
modern psychology is not seldom called the new psychol- 
ogy, in striking contrast to the preceding two thousand 
years of psychological interest. In the past the study 
of the mind, in spite of its essentially philosophical char- 
acter, did not lack elements of empirical observation, but 
the observations were confined to mental life under nat- 
ural conditions. With the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the observation under artificial conditions begins. The 
psychologists themselves were not the leaders in the new. 
method. The physiologists who studied the functions of 
the eye and ear and of the muscles were led to experi- 
ments which threw light on mental facts and gave the 
strongest impulse toward an independent interest in men- 
tal experiments. Suggestions came also from other neigh- 
boring sciences. Physicists examined experimentally the 
relations between the strength of the physical impressions 
and the inner sensations. Even the astronomers found 
reasons to experiment with regard to mental functions, as 
it was observed that the correct observation of the stars 
depended upon mental conditions, which varied among dif- 
ferent observers. It became necessary to measure the 
rapidity with which the individual mind reacted on the 
astronomical stimulus, and that led to general experiments 



54 PSYCHOLOGY 

on the quickness of mental processes. Not a few psycho- 
logical experiments were carried on in this way before 
the psychologists began to establish special laboratories for 
their own purposes. The first institute, which was to be 
the mother institute of most psychological laboratories the 
world over, was founded in Leipzig in 1879. It was de- 
voted exclusively to selfobservation under artificial condi- 
tions, and it naturally began with such simple experiments 
as those which had been carried on in the neighboring 
fields before. The development was an unusually quick 
one; the movement spread to all countries, Germany and 
the United States leading in this new interest. America 
has at present more than half a hundred psychological 
laboratories. 

The internal development, however, was still more rapid. 
In its early days it seemed a matter of course that only 
elementary processes would be accessible to experimental 
methods. The borderland regions between mind and body, 
the sensations and perceptions, space and time problems, 
the simplest association and reaction questions were the 
natural field, while the higher mental activities seemed 
beyond reach. But, as soon as the psychologists had their 
own keys, many new doors could be opened. The experi- 
mental method was soon successfully brought to the study 
of memory and of attention, later of feelings and emo- 
tions, of thoughts and esthetic states and volitions. Cer- 
tainly the experiment under laboratory conditions is as yet 
not equally developed in all regions of mental life, and 
is so far better adjusted to the problems of perception and 
memory than to those of emotion and will. Yet it can be 
said that there is no group of mental processes which has 
not been made accessible to the experimental method. 

But the triumph of the laboratory is not confined to 
the rich development of methods for exact selfobservation. 
Its aid is no less significant in the regions of indirect oh- 
servation. The old animal psychology consisted of anec- 



SCOPE AND METHODS OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 55 

dotes of dogs and horses, hunting stories and onesided 
interest in the mental life of ants and bees ; the experiment 
transformed it into an exact science which traces every 
mental function through the whole kingdom of animals. 
Child psychology was not in the same degree dependent 
upon experimental methods, as the opportunities for steady 
observation under natural conditions were more favorable, 
and much excellent detail had been observed by parents 
and teachers before the experiment aided the studj^ More- 
over it is evident that the hygienic interests of the child 
set rather narrow limits to persistent experimentation. Yet 
here too the experiment has been applied with full success 
from the reactions of the infant in its first minutes of life 
to the complex mental processes of the adolescent. In the 
same w^ay the laboratory method has shed new light on the 
disturbances of the diseased mind, and still more on those 
abnormities which lie in the borderland between health 
and illness. Moreover in the sphere of mental abnormity 
the experiment has taken still another form. The aim 
is not only to carry on experimental studies with the ab- 
normal mind, for instance, research on the abnormal 
memory or intelligence or feeling, but to produce by ex- 
periment abnormal mental states in otherwise normal men. 
The typical case is that of hypnotism. The hypnotic ex- 
periment is certainly an effective means for the discovery 
of many psychological facts which cannot be studied under 
normal conditions. 

The whole science of psychical life is thus revolutionized by the 
methods of experiment, and throughout has been ^^ctorious in 
this sign. But its strength ought not to be misinterpreted. We 
have emphasized before that the experiment does not stand 
in contrast to selfobservation and is by no means superseding 
it, but only aiding it. We have to add now that it is no less 
misleading, if it is brought into contrast with the quaUtative 
analysis of mental states and is glorified as a scheme to perform 
a quantitative measurement of the conscious experience. On 



56 PSYCHOLOGY 

the surface it looks indeed as if the laboratory work were 
measuring mental states as such. If we look deeper, we recog- 
nize that this is an illusion. All which we measure are physical 
quantities, and all the figures which enter into our laboratory 
report refer ultimately to physical conditions of mental experi- 
ence. The mental experience itself remains only a qualitative 
manifoldness. The mental states are alike, or are different, but 
one never contains a number of others. A physical ten-candle- 
power light contains ten times the light of one candle, but the 
psychical light impression of the strong light does not contain 
so and so many times the light impressions of the weaker. The 
strong and the faint impression are different, but we cannot find 
the one in the other. All physical measurements are based on 
the counting of units. The ten-foot distance contains ten times 
one foot. But in the world of impressions or other mental 
states neither the contents themselves nor their differences from 
one another can be put together and summed up. 

If we call two mental states equal, the term must not be 
used in the mathematical sense. It means only that we do not 
discriminate qualitative differences. If we were to apply arith- 
metic to the mental relations themselves, we should be entirely 
misled. If we start with a red sensation and go through all 
shades of red orange to orange and so on by smallest steps to 
yellow and green and blue and violet and purple, we can count 
the number of just noticeable differences, and this number would 
be much larger for the distances from red to purple through- 
out the rainbow colors than from red to green; and yet psycho- 
logically red and purple are very similar, and show a very small 
difference, while red and green are very different. The knowl- 
edge of ten pages of text is not ten times the knowledge of one 
page; the memory image of two men is not twice the memory 
image of one man; we cannot have the same anger or the same 
volition three times. We have no right to believe that exact 
psychology has made the mental life itself measurable. The 
exactitude refers to the discrimination of qualitative differences 
on the mental side and careful measurement of the causes and 
effects on the physical side. This is not a weakness of present 
day psychology which the future may overcome, but it is one 
of the deepest characteristics of the psychical material itself. 



SCOPE AND METHODS OF CAUSAL PSYCHOLOGY 57 

Only one further methodological aspect must be men- 
tioned. All the methods of direct and indirect observa- 
tion under natural and under experimental conditions re- 
ferred to the mental states and their relation to preced- 
ing or following physical events. We have not yet spoken 
about the ways by which the correlation between the men- 
tal event and the accompanying parallel brain process is 
determined. Such methods can hardly be calle(J psycho- 
logical, however important the results of such work may 
be for the theoretical explanation of the psychologist. In 
the foreground here are the methods of anatomy, of physi- 
ology and of pathology. The anatomist traces the connec- 
tions between particular brain parts and the sense organs 
or the muscles, and in this w^ay can throw light on the 
psychophysical functions of those nervous centers. The 
contribution of the anatomist becomes especially impor- 
tant through comparative anatomy. If certain mental 
abilities are characteristic of some animals, while they 
are rudimentary in others, the anatomist can find out 
whether a particular region of the central nervous system 
is highly developed in the one and undeveloped in the 
other gi^oup. 

But the more direct aid to this side problem comes from 
the physiologist, who studies directly how far the artificial 
stimulation of a certain brain region produces in the 
animal an expression of mental activity and how far the 
artificial destruction of the same central region results in 
an interference with that particular form of mental be- 
havior. And finally the pathologist gathers the material 
which the dissection of the diseased brain after the death 
of the patient exhibits. If certain mental functions had 
become defective during lifetime and the autopsy now 
shows a degeneration of special brain tracts, the pathologist 
links the mental and the physical disturbances. In the 
middle of the last century the discovery of characteristic 
lesions of the brain in cases of speech defects gave to 



58 PSYCHOLOGY 

psycliology an impulse in this direction which led to a long 
series of most important researches. These pathological 
observations, on the other hand, were constantly supple- 
mented by the physiological experiments and aided by the 
rapid progress of comparative anatomy. In this way the 
theory of psychocerebral parallelism found its fullest de- 
velopment in the same few decades in which experimental 
psychology was unfolding. The results of both are com- 
bined in the system of modern causal psychology. 



PAET 11. THE INDIVIDUAL PROCESSES 
A. THE ELEMENTARY INDIVIDUAL PROCESSES 

CHAPTER VI 

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 

The Sense Organ-Brain-Muscle Arc. — If every feeling, 
every idea, every will act, every emotion must be con- 
sidered as an accompaniment of brain processes, we must 
try first of all to understand these organic processes them- 
selves, before we connect them with psychical experiences. 
We may look on the brain, accordingly, with the eyes of 
the physiologist, who seeks to reduce everything to physi- 
cal and chemical changes in the cells of the body and 
who, from his standpoint, cannot be aware of any accom- 
panying mental states. What are the character and the 
significance of the brain processes, seen from his view- 
point? Are they to him numberless chance activities in 
the cells of the brain, or can he unify them and illuminate 
the manifoldness by a simple principle? Let us compare 
the situation with the physiologist's interest in some other 
bodily organ. The heart is performing its complicated 
contractions, the stomach is producing its gland secre- 
tions. Does tlie physiologist ever feel satisfied with simply 
recording those physical and chemical facts ? He certainly 
goes far beyond such a mere description of cell activity; 
he asks how far this heart contraction or stomach secre- 

59 



60 PSYCHOLOGY 

tion is useful for the purpose of our organism. Through 
this problem of usefulness, the physical-chemical mechan- 
ism is brought into an entirely new light. It leads to a 
true explanation of the organ and its development. 

As soon as the biologist can show that a part of the 
organism is useful for its conservation, he can apply all 
the principles which the modern doctrine of evolution re- 
gards as vehicles for the advance of the race. He would 
be unable to explain a bodily apparatus which is unneces- 
sary for the self preservation of the race. But if it can 
be shown that a particular variation of the body is helpful 
to the individual or its descendants in the struggle for 
physical existence, he understands that it gave to the or- 
ganism a more favorable chance to survive and to transmit 
its traits to the next generation. To be sure, the biologist 
of to-day considers the process of race evolution not so 
simple as it appeared some decades ago in the high tide 
of Darwinism. Many new difficulties and many necessary 
side principles have to be acknowledged ; and yet the fun- 
damental principles stand. If we aim toward a causal ex- 
planation of the forms of animal life and not toward a 
purposive interpretation of the plans of nature, we must 
recognize in the usefulness of the organ the condition for 
its development. 

But if this is the case, the biologist cannot consider the 
heart or the stomach as isolated organs. The contractions 
of the heart would be entirely useless, if there were no 
arteries and no veins connected with it and no lungs for 
the chemism. of the blood ; and the pepsin secretion of the 
stomach would be useless, if the whole system of the di- 
gestive apparatus from the mouth cavity downward were 
not connected with it. As soon as such a group of organs 
is understood as a unity, their combined action indeed ap- 
pears indispensable for the individual and therefore ex- 
plainable from the standpoint of evolutionary biology. 

The brain of the frog as well as the brain of man would 



THE NEKVOUS SYSTEM 61 

likewise be superfluous and useless, if it were considered 
as an isolated apparatus. But everything is changed when 
the brain is understood as the complicated central mechan- 
ism of a much larger system. The brain is in direct con- 
nection with the outer surface of the body and with the 
sense organs on it. The eyes, the ears, the nose, the skin 
are linked by hundreds of thousands of nerve fibers with 
the sensory parts of the brain. At the same time the 
muscles which contract the peripheral organs of the body 
are connected with the motor parts of the brain, and in 
the brain itself the sensory and the motor parts are com- 
pletely interrelated by millionfold paths. Hence the brain 
can work like a central switchboard through which the ex- 
citement of the sensory system, beginning with the stimula- 
tion of the sense organs, is transmitted to the motor 
system, where it ends with the contraction of muscles. The 
nerves which lead from the surface of the body to the 
brain are the centripetal part, and the nerves which lead 
from the brain to the muscles are the centrifugal part 
of one arc of which the brain is the central part. If 
this arc is considered as a whole, its unified function be- 
comes evident. The sense organs are stimulated by the 
surrounding w^orld, and the muscles produce the changes 
in the surrounding world. The arc from sense organ 
through the hrojin to the muscle is the apparatus by which 
the organism can adjust its actions in the outer ivorld 
to the conditions of the surroundings. 

The Development of the Nervous System. — We said 
that the biologist is able to explain such sj^stems, in case 
that their physiological functions are useful to the or- 
ganism. As soon as this arc from sense organ through 
the brain to the muscle is considered as such a mechanism 
by which the movements are adjusted to the surroundings, 
its usefulness is evident. An organism which had sense 
organs and brain and could receive inner excitements from 
the lights and sounds and odors and pressures of the world 



62 PSYCHOLOGY 

could not survive if no nerves connected the brain with 
the muscles ; and on the other hand a brain connected with 
the motor apparatus would be entirely useless if it were 
not influenced by the excitements of the sense organs. In 
both cases alike the organism would be helpless. But as 
soon as the motor action is a response to the sensory 
stimuli, the conservation of the individual can be secured. 
It can escape the dangers, can withdraw from the injurious 
contact, can approach and grasp the nourishing substance, 
can attack the enemy and follow the prey. 

If we look over the whole world of animals, we find that 
at every stage of development this useful correlation be- 
tween sense organ and motor response is effective. It is 
just this usefulness of adjustment, this fitness of expres- 
sion and impression which leads the naturalist instinctively 
to a psychological interpretation of animal behavior. The 
actions are so usefully adapted to the surroundings and so 
clearly serve the interests of the individual and its descend- 
ants that we always feel tempted to see in them the work- 
ing of a selecting intelligence, or at least a conscious regu- 
lation by sensations and feelings and will impulses. The 
amoeba which we watch under the microscope in a drop 
of water responds to the stimuli of the surroundings in a 
perfectly useful way. If a dangerous stimulus comes in 
contact with its surface, its contractile substance forms a 
ball and by that reduces the chance of contact to the min- 
imum; if nourishing matter touches the same surface, it 
reacts by expanding and bringing its body as much as 
possible into contact with it. The monocellular being 
acts there as if it hated the one and loved the other, and 
as if liking or disliking had led to considerations and 
finally to will impulses. These useful reactions are so com- 
pletely adjusted to the narrow needs of those lowest beings 
that we have no right to say that they are less perfect 
than the more complicated reactions of the higher or- 
ganisms which because of their greater differentiation need 



THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 63 

a much richer system of responsive movements for the 
struggle of life. The infusor is no less well adapted to 
the helpful and injurious conditions in his drop of water 
than the frog to those in his pond or the man of civiliza- 
tion to those in his metropolis. 

But the biologist may stick consistently to his purely 
physical-chemical view, in spite of the apparent expres- 
sion of intelligence. After a meal millions of cells in our 
organism perform the work of transforming the food into 
substances which are needed by the body and distributing 
them to the various organs of the body with the greatest 
possible adjustment to the needs. A host of intelligent 
chemists could not work out in years the details of the 
processes which our abdominal organs carry out in a few 
hours. And yet the physiologist does not refer them to 
any abdominal soul, or to any planning intelligence: he 
starts with the conviction that all these useful perform- 
ances result from merely physiological cell activities. The 
usefulness and apparently intelligent fitness of the motor 
reactions in the infusor and the frog and the man do 
not, therefore, demand the reference to intelligence either, 
as long as we remain loyal to the physiologist's stand- 
point. On the contrary, it is this usefulness, as we saw, 
which becomes the vehicle for a biological explanation. 

In the lowest forms the whole surface may still receive 
all the stimuli which are essential, and the whole body may 
still contract and expand. Then differentiation leads 
to an increased sensitiveness of particular regions to 
special outside excitements, that is, it leads to the forma- 
tion of sense organs. Correspondingly, special parts of the 
bodily substance acquire ability for isolated contraction; 
that is, they become muscles. As soon as sense organs 
and muscles are developing, the transmission of the excite- 
ment from the one to the other must become localized too. 
Special paths of least resistance form themselves; they are 
the nerves. The next step is a more complex interrelation 



64 PSYCHOLOGY 

between the various organs of stimulation and the various 
muscles. One sense stimulus must be able to produce the 
contraction of many muscles, or many sense stimuli must 
be able to cooperate toward the contraction of one particu- 
lar muscle. This is possible only when the nerves form a 
network. Such an interconnection allows the cooperation 
of many parts, but the responses are still the reactions to 
the immediate stimuli. 

As soon as evolution has reached a stage of higher com- 
plexity, the animal would be unable to protect itself 
against dangers and to secure its food and its safety, if a 
further variation were not developed by natural selection. 
The movements must not only be adapted to the impres- 
sions of the moment, but also to the earlier ones. The 
action then becomes a response to the present experiences 
together with the preceding ones. All that is necessary 
for this great further step is that certain parts of that 
network of nerves which intermediates between surface 
and muscle acquire a new trait. They must become able 
to sum up excitements; the first impression must leave a 
certain after-effect which unites with the later excitements 
in the control of the resulting reactions. The animal can 
now adjust its movements to objects which are not im- 
mediately in the sphere of its senses, but which previously 
were connected with the present surroundings. Those 
parts of the nervous system which especially regulate the 
cooperation of peripheral functions and stir up the after- 
effects of preceding stimuli become anatomically distinct 
nervous centers. 

As soon as we reach the higher animals, this system of 
centers is developed to a high complexity. Protected by 
the skull and the vertebrge, the clusters of central organs 
are grouped as brain and spinal cord. Sensory nerves 
lead to them from the higher sense organs and from every 
part of the skin, and motor nerves lead from the central 
nervous system to every muscle. The interrelations be- 



THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 65 

tween the various regions in spinal cord and brain become 
richer and richer from fish to reptiles and amphibians, to 
birds and mammals. The immediate arcs between the sen- 
sory and motor centers become more and more subordinated 
to the superstructure, the cerebral hemispheres, which 
reach their fullest development in the higher mammals. 
Only through their centers the most complex correlations 
of the lower centers can be secured. The situation becomes 
still more complex by the fact that not only the surface 
but also the inner organs send their messages to the brain, 
and that the centrifugal impulses do not go merely to the 
outer muscles, but also to the glands and blood vessels and 
inner organs. But even where this nervous differentiation 
has reached its greatest manifoldness, we find as its only 
function this perfectly useful adjustment of the reaction 
to the physical-chemical conditions of the surroundings, 
and as it remains useful at every stage, the intermediating 
brain action appears entirely explainable. 

The Biological Aspect of Man. — Fundamentally no new 
principle sets in when nature proceeds from the highest 
animals to the human beings. Three features are especially 
characteristic of the new" step. They have long been 
prepared in the reactions of the animals. First man 
develops the tool. It is a condition for an extreme advance 
in achievement, and yet the change is exactly in the direc- 
tion in which the development from the infusor to the 
monkey went on. It is a new means for reacting usefully 
on the surrounding world. It is simply an extension of 
that arc from sense organ through brain to muscle. Our 
eye is sharpened by the telescope and the micix)scope, our 
ear receives messages by long distance telephone, our brain 
is stimulated by cable and newspaper from every place on 
the globe, our brain connections are disburdened by our 
libraries, the motor impulses of our brain can produce 
dynamite explosions, and better than by our muscles we 
can swim by our steamers, can run by our locomotives, 



66 PSYCHOLOGY 

can fly by our aeroplanes. This enrichment of the reac- 
tion apparatus shows one fundamental advantage, on which 
our whole technical civilization is based : the new additions 
to the biological arc are detachable. They are not de- 
stroyed by the death of the individual. In the whole com- 
plexity which they have reached during the lifetime of 
the organism they can be handed over to the descendants. 
The work of the generations can be cumulated in them. 
But the role of the central nervous system remains un- 
changed; from a biological point of view the brain which 
receives the stimuli from the remotest corners of the earth 
and which can produce effects that may last through thou- 
sands of years, remains the automatic transmitter between 
the centripetal and the centrifugal excitements. 

Secondly, one of the motor products is especially sig- 
nificant, the air waves which the vocal cords produce as 
means of communication. The language of man is pre- 
ceded by the sounds which the animals produce, just as 
the technic of man is preceded by the nest of the bird 
and even by the house of the snail. The biologist has no 
difficulty in understanding the development of this ap- 
paratus which functions by producing sounds as they at- 
tract or warn or threaten other animals in a most useful 
way. Its further differentiation in the rise of man remains 
entirely open to such a biological explanation. Every step 
forward had its distinct advantage for the preservation of 
the social group in the struggle for existence. The sound 
which the one ejects and the other receives as ear stimulus 
becomes a substitute for the objects of the surroundings. 
The more the language becomes differentiated, the larger is 
the circle of things which one individual can bring into 
the sphere of others by words just as if they were present 
to sense. Moreover not only the things, but their mutual 
relations are replaced by sounds and the man who hears 
the spoken language is thus stimulated by a much larger 
part of the world than ever could reach him through actual 



THE NEEVOUS SYSTEM 67 

sense contact. Any relations past and future can now 
become the stimuli which lead the brain to action, and the 
sound is replaced by the signs of the written or printed 
words. Each speaking individual lives in a world which 
is incomparably richer than that in which the individuals 
on the biologically lower stage moved, but it is again 
merely a new advance in the same direction of evolution. 
Besides the development of tool and language, and in 
very close dependence upon them, we find, thirdly, the 
spread of all forms of cooperation. Animal life anticipates 
this method of adjustment to external conditions, especially 
in the joint work of the family. But only with man 
does the great economic exchange set in. It is again only 
an enrichment of the functions of the phj^siological arc. 
At the stage of the human differentiation the single in- 
dividual is no longer able to receive all the sensory stimuli, 
to produce all the motor reactions and to make all the con- 
nections between the sensory and the motor systems which 
would be needed for his personal protection. A social dif- 
ferentiation begins by which the one produces reactions 
useful not only to himself but to many others, and is in 
exchange relieved by the reactions which others perform 
for him. From this new principle the market arises, the 
vocations and professions develop, life becomes more and 
more complicated ; and yet every individual activity in 
the service of such cooperation still remains the most use- 
ful possible reaction of the organism to the total set of con- 
ditions. The development reaches its climax in those ac- 
tions which, seen from an inner point of view, appear di- 
rectly opposed to the principle of selfpreservation, namely 
the altruistic actions. The moral life is the unselfish life : 
actions are performed which serve not the actor but an- 
other individual. Yet, from a biological viewpoint the 
situation appears different. .Each individual's preserva- 
tion is first of all bound up with the welfare of the whole 
group to which he belongs. A group of mutually helpful 



68 PSYCHOLOGY 

organisms will survive, while a group of individuals which 
fight on© another must be weak and without chances. 

Hence the biologist, however one-sided his standpoint 
must be, is perfectly justified in claiming that the whole 
system of human hrain processes is biologically useful and 
therefore explainable through merely physical causes like 
all the other functions of the organism. The diffi- 
culties which he finds in his way, the unsolved detailed 
problems of inheritance, of growth and so on refer to the 
function of the blood-vessels or of the digestive tract as 
much as to that of the nervous system. But he does not 
need any mental interference in the latter more than in 
that of the former. He can take it for granted that even 
the wisest word and the noblest action may be consistently 
understood as a physical-chemical effect of strictly physi- 
ological causes. If all the atomistic dispositions of the 
brain and all the influences on the brain with all their 
after-effects were known, the acquaintance with the present 
sense stimuli would be sufficient to determine what motor 
response would go on in the individual. It is no counter- 
argument that the stimuli may be very similar, and yet the 
effects extremely different. In a telegram which we receive 
the change of a single letter may change all the reactions 
of greatest joy into those of deepest distress. But that is 
not surprising, as all the earlier experiences of the brain 
have created a setting in which the one or the other optical 
word sign moves entirely different physiological levers. A 
minimum dose of arsenic may also appear extremely simi- 
lar to a dose of sugar ; and yet as soon as it is swallowed, 
it affects millions of cells in the organism by its destructive 
power. 

We now have the foundations for a truly psychophysical 
system. We have recognized that the causal aspect of 
mental life requires us to treat all the mental elements as 
accompaniments of brain processes, and all their connec- 
tions as results of physiologically necessary causal proc- 



THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 69 

esses. This would be a hopeless undertaking, if it were by 
principle impossible to explain all the brain actions in 
human life from mere physical causes. But now we have 
seen that as parts of the arc between sense organ and 
muscle they are under all circumstances useful in their 
normal functioning and therefore physically explainable. 
The task before us is to understand the psychical elements 
and their coming and going as parallel to this closed chain 
of physical events. Every psychical element and every 
psychical law must accordingly be understood as related 
to some part or some process in the biological arc, either 
to its centripetal or its central or its centrifugal segment. 
This biological view of psychophysical action, which is in- 
dispensable for causal psychology, must control the study 
of every single feature. The usefulness of the processes 
is the condition for their development. 



CHAPTER YII 
STIMULATION 

The Psychical Elements. — The chain of processes from 
the stimulation of the sense organ to the movement of the 
muscles, which has appeared to us so far as a merely physi- 
cal activity of the nervous system, must now be illuminated 
by the mental events which accompany it. We naturally 
begin with those which form the initial part in this life 
process of organic adjustment. No impulse to adapted 
action is possible unless as a starting point the outer world 
impresses the brain. Physiologically, our question would 
be only : what external processes have the power to stimu- 
late the central nervous system ? We should then trace the 
impressions which the light rays and the sounds and the 
temperatures and the pressures and the odors may exert 
on the brain elements when they are transmitted through 
sense organs. But for us the problem is now a psychophysi- 
cal one : what mental contents accompany the brain proc- 
esses that result from such external stimulation ? As soon 
as this psychological side is emphasized, the analysis of 
the mental impressions must be the starting point. We find 
in ourselves experiences which correspond to the stimula- 
tions from without. We must resolve these inner states. 
We ask accordingly which elements we can discriminate 
when we see and hear and touch the world around us. 

Only one way is open to us. We must turn our attention 
to the impressions which we receive and try to discriminate 
in them all noticeable differences. If we taste some ice 
cream, we may feel the impression as a unit, but if we 

70 



STIMULATION 71 

begin to analyze that perceptive material, we easily dis- 
criminate the coldness from the sweetness and the mere 
touch impression from either. And if we are aiding this 
selfobservation by experiment, our separation of elements 
may go still further. Experimenting does not necessarily 
require the use of instruments. We perform an experi- 
ment if we observe the taste of ice cream while we close 
the passages of our nose. Then we find that, under these 
artificial conditions, the sweet loses its chocolate flavor. 
That is, we discover that the impression which appeared to 
be a mere taste also contained elements of smell. We have 
accordingly no elementary content before us when we ex- 
perience the impression of chocolate ice cream, because we 
can resolve it into simpler factors, into the taste sensation 
of sweet and the smell sensation of flavor and the tempera- 
ture sensation of cold and the tactual sensation of smooth- 
ness ; and if we went on experimentally, we should be able 
to show that even this impression of smoothness can be re- 
solved into still simpler elements. To enumerate all the 
mental indivisible parts which can be discovered in our 
outer impressions demands an introspection with all the 
aids which the laboratory can furnish. The apparently 
simple stimuli like pressure on the skin or contact often 
demand the most complicated experimental investigations 
to discover the mental elements in their perception. 

If the elements of our perceptions are called sensations, 
the list of our sensations is long, and yet rather short com- 
pared with the multitude of objects which we perceive. 
On the one hand the same elements may be combined in 
numberless forms, just as the few letters of the alphabet 
are combined into the works of Shakespeare. On the other 
hand the technical devices of civilization may transform 
the stimuli of outer things to bring them into the limited 
compass of our sensations. To protect ourselves we must 
react to the dangerous bacilli of diphtheria and tuber- 
culosis and we must discriminate the tenth of a degree of 



72 PSYCHOLOGY 

blood temperature and the smallest poisonous addition to 
our food. Our naked senses are not sufficient. We cannot 
see the dangerous tubercle bacillus as we see the danger- 
ous snake, nor can we discriminate by our senses a tenth of 
a degree of temperature or smell or taste a milligram of 
arsenic. All this is done by those detachable appendages 
to our senses. We see by the microscope, we measure with 
the thermometer, we examine the chemical reactions. 
Biologically, the sensory apparatus is by these technical 
methods wonderfully enriched. The circle of objects which 
stimulates our psychophysical system and becomes the 
starting point for reactions, is gigantically expanded, but 
the number of psychophysical elements is not increased by 
this change. No attachment to the eye can bring to 
the brain any visual elements which are not contained in 
the natural impressions without the technical help. On the 
contrary, the devices of technic may easily lead to a 
neglect of sense discriminations by which the number of 
sensation differences becomes decreased. We civilized men 
may be less aware of difference of temperature sensations 
than the primitive people since we do not give attention to 
them and rely on the visual impressions which the ther- 
mometer furnishes. We must now study the different 
groups of sensations, and may begin with the most com- 
plex, the sensations of light. 

a. OPTICAL STIMULATION 

The System of Light Sensations. — Looking out into the 
street we see objects near and far, to the right and to the 
left, large and small, and in all possible forms. Moreover 
we see the objects changing their forms and positions. We 
see a man walking, that is, his passing through different 
places in succeeding times, as directly as we see the color 
of his red necktie. But when it comes to enumerating the 
elements, we recognize that all the space traits involve re- 



STIMUT.ATION 73 

lations and are not elementary as that red color impression 
is. If we seek the visual elements, we are not interested 
whether the objects are round or triangular and in what 
rhythm they succeeded one another. We consider simply the 
elementary material out of which the mental impressions 
are formed. In doing so we single out a side of the actual 
experience which never exists alone. Even the shortest 
light impression has a time value for us, and the smallest 
color point has a space value. But we want to abstract at 
first from these aspects as much as we disregard the fact 
that the color has an element of pleasantness or unpleas- 
antness for us, or that it forces itself on our attention. 

The classification which lies nearest is that which sep- 
arates the colors from the colorless light sensations. To 
gain a quick survey of both regions, we may group all the 
colorless sensations in one series from white through the 
light grays and dark grays down to black. We may pro- 
ceed similarly with the colors. In the rainbow series of the 
spectrum we recognize at once the red, orange, yellow, 
blue, green, violet. But if a long spectrum is carefully ex- 
amined and we study the smallest differences of neighbor- 
ing spots which we can discriminate, the well-trained eye 
distinguishes between the extreme red and the extreme vio- 
let about one hundred and fifty small steps. There are all the 
greenish yellows and yellowish greens, and bluish greens 
and greenish blues, and so on. If this were all, we should 
have between red and violet one long series of many colors, 
just as we had between white and black one long series of 
grays, in both cases each sensation most similar to its 
neighbor and separated by a just perceivable difference. 

But the two cases, after all, are not alike. If we go from 
white to black, we feel that every point between them, 
every gray, has a certain similarity to both, and the fur- 
ther we go away from white and the more we approach the 
black, the less our gray appears whitish and the more 
blackish. If we pass from red to violet, the experience is 



74 PSYCHOLOGY 

quite different. At first we come from red through orange 
red to orange yellow, to golden yellow, to yellow, and have 
along the whole way the distinct impression of a decreas- 
ing similarity to the red and an increasing similarity to 
the yellow. The yellow itself no longer reminds us of the 
red. As soon as we pass the yellow, we come into a 
series in which each color tone has similarity to both yellow 
and green, changing toward greenishness the further we re- 
move from yellow. At green again a fundamental change 
appears. Each following color becomes less greenish and 
more bluish until we reach blue. And now the turn comes 
for the last time. Toward the end of the spectrum the 
colors become less and less bluish and more and more red- 
dish. If we add the various hues of purple to the violet, we 
can pass directly from the blue through violet without any 
break to the red sensation with which the spectrum began. 
In the white gray black series we had only two end points, 
black and white. Everything between them is character- 
ized by similarity to both. But we see that in the color 
series we have four such points of reference, red, yellow, 
green and blue, and every possible color impression gets 
its color value through its similarity to two of these four 
points. 

How ought we to interpret this color series. If we look 
at a series of uniform colored papers, a greenish blue or a 
reddish blue, that is violet, or a reddish yellow, that is 
orange, appear to us, each taken by itself, just as simple as 
a yellow or a blue or a green. If we emphasize this fact, 
we should have to say that these one hundred and fifty 
color sensations are all independent ultimate elements. 
This is often maintained. But after all this ignores the 
significant fact from which we started, namely that if we 
pass along through the spectrum series, we can feel every 
hue between red and yellow as being related to those two 
end points, and the same of the colors between yellow and 
green, and green and blue, and blue and red. What else 



STIMULATION 75 

does this similarity to the two colors mean but that under 
the favorable conditions of such an experiment we become 
aware of the reddishness and yellowishness in the orange, 
wiiich we are accustomed to ignore, if we look at the orange 
alone. There is some real reddishness and some real bluish- 
ness in the violet sensation. 

To be sure, those two elements in it are not mixed like 
salt and pepper. At every physical violet point both the 
red and the blue are found. But we are not speaking here 
of physical stimuli ; we are speaking of the mental content 
and, if two mental contents become mixed, we cannot expect 
anything but a new mental content in which the two ele- 
ments which enter lose their independent character, fuse 
into a unit, and yet give to the new product similarity 
to both of the two. We have a right, accordingly, to 
say that all those one hundred and fifty color differences 
result from the combination of the mental elements red, 
yellow, green and hlue. The achromatic series then de- 
mands the same interpretation. Every gray is a mix- 
ing and blending of the white sensation and the hlach 
sensation. 

Saturation and Brightness. — A glance at the world 
teaches us that these pure spectral colors and the series 
of grays are only a small part of our impressions. Hardly 
any colored objects in a room show those rich and saturated 
colors which the spectrum presents. Our blotting paper 
may be green, but it is a dull and unsaturated green 
in which the greenishness does not appear with that im- 
pressiveness in which it stood out in the spectrum ; and the 
brown oak furniture is colored, and yet its color has found 
no place in that rainbow series. Nor did w^e have there any 
pink or olive or salmon or lilac color in our series of a 
hundred and fifty hues. Yet here too we quickly discover 
a simple systematic order, if we study what results when 
the pure color sensations are mixing and fusing with color- 
less sensations. As white and black are blending in gray, 



76 psy(;hology 

white and red are blending in pink, and white and violet in 
lilac, and black and yellow in brown. 

Here, too, the question of simplicity arises. The pink 
in itself appears an entirely simple, unified impression. 
But if we look over that whole long series from pure red to 
pure white, each step a little less reddish, and a little more 
whitish, then we recogniz.e that every pink contains a red- 
dish and a whitish element. Every single colorless sensa- 
tion from white through gray to black can fuse with every 
single color sensation and can be mixed with it in any pro- 
portion. Our blotting paper green is green fusing with a 
rather dark gray, and the blotting papers vary between a 
rather saturated green with little gray in it to an almost 
grayish paper with very little green in it. If we were 
seeking a graphic symbol, we could think of every one of 
the one hundred and fifty hues as the apex of a triangle of 
which the base is a line from white to black, containing 
all the different shades of gray which we can discern. In 
these triangles every point of the base can be connected by 
a straight line with the apex, and each of these lines would 
represent the series of different mixtures between the color 
sensation and a particular gray sensation, that is, the 
color of the apex in all degrees of saturation. We are ac- 
customed to call those which lie on the whitish side of the 
triangle the tints and those on the blackish side of the 
triangle the shades. 

Everyone of these triangles would contain, accordingly, 
several hundred different combinations of the hue with all 
kinds of gray in all proportions. On the other hand evi- 
dently no combination in one triangle could reappear in 
any of the other triangles. The psychologists, therefore, 
recognize thirty to forty thousand different color impres- 
sions. Yet it is clear that as everyone of those hues was a 
blending of the four colors, red, yellow, green, blue, and 
every gray a blending of the two impressions, white and 
black, and every tint and shade a blending of one of the 



STIMIJLATION 77 

colors with one of the grays, this bewildering manifoldness 
can be brought down to a system of combinations of six 
light sensations. In order to determine a particular color 
impression, we must indicate which of the six impressions 
are present and with what intensity they enter into the 
combination. 

This whole system of light impressions can be looked on 
from another point of view. We spoke of the colorless 
series ai§ one which leads from white through gray to black, 
and we treated those two end points as two qualities like 
red and blue. But in ordinary life we are inclined to take 
a different point of view. The black is darkness to us, 
the absence of light sensations, and the series from black 
through gray to white presents an increasing hriglitness. 
If the sun shines on white paper and then we close the 
shutters of the windows, the white becomes gray, and the 
more we exclude the light the more blackish it becomes; 
and yet it is more natural to say, not that black is mixed 
in, but that it becomes darker and darker. We all have a 
certain difficulty in watching our real light sensations, be- 
cause we attach the names of the objects to the light and 
believe that the sensation is still present as long as we know 
that the object is before us. We call a blackboard black, 
even if the sun shines on it so fully that we see practically 
a rather light gray; and we call our paper white in spite 
of a deep shadow on it by which we actually see a dark 
gray. But if we emancipate ourselves from this thought of 
the objects, we recognize that under all circumstances the 
series from white to black means the series from greatest 
brightness to deepest darkness. 

As soon as we study this brightness aspect of our light 
impressions, the world of colors appears to us also bright 
and dark. The yellow is brighter than the blue, and the 
blue tints and shades can go through any degree of bright- 
ness. If the sun breaks through the clouds, every color 
in our room becomes brighter, and if twilight falls, every 



78 PSYCHOLOGY 

color becomes darker. "We can easily determine the degree 
of brightness by comparing the color with various grays. 
A color patch on the background of a blackish gray may 
appear bright, on the background of a whitish gray it may 
appear dark, and in changing the gray we can find the gray 
background on which it appears neither brighter nor darker, 
but equally bright. We can thus refer the brightness of 
every color impression to an objective scale of gray sensa- 
tions. From this point of view we must be able to arrange 
the color sensations also according to the different degrees 
of brightness. It is evident that this is not a really new 
element in our impressions, but only a new angle of com- 
parison suggested by particular interests. 

The Visual Stimuli. — Our next question must be how 
these visual sensations which we have mustered are re- 
lated to the visual stimuli of the surroundings. The world 
is visible in so far as it sends out or reflects ether waves of 
a particular length. The long ether waves which carry 
the wireless messages stand in no relation to vision. But if 
they become as short as 690 millionths of a millimeter, they 
produce in our nervous system an excitement which is ac- 
companied by the sensation of red, and if the waves be- 
come shorter and shorter, the psychocerebral processes pass 
through those one hundred and fifty hues to violet, where 
the rays are only 390 millionths of a millimeter long. If 
the ether waves become still shorter, they cannot reach the 
optical centers and are invisible, in spite of their chemical 
effects. While the color hue corresponds to the length of 
the wave, the saturation corresponds to the simplicity of 
the waves. The more complex the wave becomes, that is, 
the more wave rhythms are combined in the light rays, the 
more uncolored light sensation is added to the color. When 
all possible rays of the sunlight are mixed, the pure white 
and gray result. The brightness, finally, depends upon the 
intensity of the light, that is the height of the wave. 

As to the correlation between the brightness and the in- 



STIMULATION 79 

tensity of the light rays, one fact stands in the foreground. 
The just perceivable difference between two sensation 
brightnesses does not depend upon the absolute but upon 
the relative difference of the light intensities. The same 
amount of candle-power which makes a gray just noticeably 
lighter, when added to a weak light, would not produce 
any brightening, if it were added to a stronger light. The 
five times stronger illumination demands a five times 
greater addition in order to produce on the psychical side 
the same just noticeable difference. The addition which is 
needed must stand in the relation of 1 to 120. The light 
of a wax candle throws clear shadows in a dark room; 
that is, we see distinctly the light difference between the 
fields on which its light falls and those which remain with- 
out. But as soon as the sunlight floods into the room, 
those candle shadows become invisible. Yet the absolute 
difference between the places which are lighted by the 
candle and the not lighted neighboring places remains the 
same. We do not notice this difference now, because the 
much stronger sunlight has added to both so much light 
intensity that the relation between them is entirely 
changed. For the same reasons we do not see the stars by 
daylight. 

This observation that the brightness of our light sensa- 
tions shows equal differences when the compared stimuli 
are in equal relations has an especial significance, because 
this principle can be found in all other sense regions too. 
It surely holds for tones and noises, for pressure sensations 
and movement sensations, and probably for taste sensa- 
tions. Everywhere we find that the equal difference of the 
intensity of sensations depends upon equal relations of the 
corresponding sthnuli. But the significance of this law lies 
most of all in its historical importance. It was the germ 
from which modern experimental ps.ychology developed. 
Based on observations of Weber and systematically de- 
veloped by Fechner in the middle of the last century, it 



80 PSYCHOLOGY 

appeared as the first case in which psychical experiences 
could be brought into a definite relation to exactly meas- 
urable physical facts. The vista of a psychology similar 
to the measuring natural sciences was opened by this dis- 
covery. As it was the first law which connected the psychi- 
cal and the physical facts in the terms of exact measure- 
ment, historical respect has even left to it the somewhat 
pompous name of the psychophysical law. 

The apparently simple relation between sensations and 
physical stimuli indicates only the typical conditions. It 
is true we can produce all color sensations by changing 
the wave lengths, all degrees of saturation by changing the 
mixture of waves, and all degrees of brightness by chang- 
ing the height of the waves. But this does not exclude 
changes occurring in all three directions under still other 
conditions. The following facts are especially noteworthy : 
First, we may go from a saturated color to mere gray not 
only by mixing it with other colors, but by decreasing its 
intensity. All colors appear gray in twilight. Or we may 
get gray by mixing only two lights of particular wave 
lengths, the so-callea complementary colors, like yellow and 
blue or purplish-red and blue-green. Moreover we may see 
gray, if we have pure light of one length only, if it is far 
aside from the point which we fixate. 

On the other hand we may produce a special color hue, 
if light rays of that particular wave length do not stimu- 
late our nervous system at all, but if lights of greater and 
less length are mixed. We can see orange by being stimu- 
lated by simple waves, but we can also see it under the in- 
fluence of red and yellow together. Furthermore, we may 
see a color in spite of the complete mixture of all rays, if 
the field is surrounded by color. It is the effect of color 
contrast. A little piece of gray paper appears blue on a 
yellow ground, yellow on a blue ground, red on a bluish- 
green ground and bluish-green on a red ground. And we 
may see a color, too, if the complementary color preceded : 



STIMULATION 81 

the color after-image. If we look at the purplish sinking 
sun, and then at a white wall, we see greenish balls on the 
white ground. The relations between the physical light 
rays and the psychocerebral sensations of light are thus 
after all very complicated. In order to understand them, 
we are obliged to give attention to the apparatus which 
intermediates between the rays of the outer world and the 
brain processes with their sensations. 

The Eye. — If we consider the construction of the human eye, 
Tve must not forget that the evident biological aim of this instru- 
ment is not only to bring to the brain notice of the light changes 
in the outer world in general, but to separate the light stimula- 
tions from hundreds of thousands of points in the outer world. 
The brain must adjust itself to the distribution of colors and 
lights in the whole space around us and in everyone of those 
smallest spots we must be able to recognize all the changes 
of quality, intensity and mixture of light. We are not engaged 
here in the analysis of space perception, but in order to under- 
stand the structure of the eye, this function of the separation 
of the messages from many single points cannot be disregarded. 
Thus the task of the eye cannot be fulfilled by having only one 
apparatus which is sensitive tO the changes of light rays, but re- 
quires hundreds of thousands of such end organs. They are of 
two types, the so called rods and cones. The shorter, the cones, 
are bottle-shaped; the longer, the rods, are straight, standing 
so near together that a half million of them form the cup-like 
retina which is the background of the eye. The cones alone fill 
the center, the fixation point, the region of sharpest seeing, 
while the rods increase in number with the distance from the 
center. 

Each of these hundreds of thousands of rods and cones is in 
connection with a nerve fiber, and all these turn toward one exit, 
leaving the retina in one big cable at the nasal side of the eye. 
These two cables from the right and left eye exchange half their 
fibers on the way to the brain. Those which come from the 
right side of the right retina go together with those from the 
right side of the left retina toward the right side of the brain. 



82 PSYCHOLOGY 

and correspondingly those from the two left sides of the retinas 
to the left side of the brain. After passing several middle sta- 
tions, they finally reach the rear part of the brain, the occipital 
lobes of the hemisphere. If a hemorrhage destroys these occi- 
pital parts on the right side of the brain, the right halves of 
both eyes become blind. 

The retina is kept functioning by a network of blood-vessels, 
the choroid. In order that the light rays may reach every part 
of this system of nerve end organs, this hollow cup, the retina 
and choroid, is filled with a gelatinous substance through which 
the light passes. In order to regulate the amount of light and 
thus to protect the sensitive end organs against overstimulation, 
the front is covered by a shutter with an opening, the pupil. This 
shutter, the iris, which according to its pigment looks green or 
brown, and if pigment is lacking looks blue, can contract or 
dilate. In full sunlight the pupil is so small that it admits 
only the twentieth part of the light which would pass in if the 
pupil were as wide as it is in twilight. This whole system is 
covered by a tough membrane, the white sclerotic. Its front 
part is again translucent to light; this is the cornea. 

Yet these parts would be insufficient to produce an image, 
that is to secure the stimulation of one rod or cone only by 
one light point in the outer world. The rays of light which 
come from one light point would flood through the pupil and 
reach hundreds of thousands of rods and cones. In addition 
a lens is needed by which the rays diverging from one 
light point of the outer world will converge toward one point 
in the retina. Such a lens is fixed in the front j^art of the eye, 
immediately behind the iris. If it were a rigid lens like that 
of the photographer, a sharp image could be secured only 
from objects which lie at a particular distance from the eye. 
The photographer brings his lens nearer to or further from the 
photographic plate, if he wants sharp images of objects at 
different distances. In the eye the lens does not change its dis- 
tance from the retina, but its curvature. The refracting power 
of the lens is in this way increased when the objects come nearer. 
All blurring can thus be avoided. 

The simplest proof that the rods and cones are really the 
visual elements by which the ether waves are transformed into 



STIMULATION 83 

the ner\"e excitements, lies in the fact that the region where the 
fibers turn into the cable of the optical nerve, and where no 
rods and cones exist, is blind. The anatomical difference of struc- 
ture suggests that cones and rods have different functions. Only 
the cones serve both for the seeing of colors and of colorless 
light, while the rods respond to colored light and to mixed light 
alike by an excitement which leads to colorless sensations. On 
the other hand the rods are, in the eye adapted to darkness, able 
to react on veiy faint light, which is too weak to stir up the 
cones. Hence in late twilight we no longer discriminate by the 
fixation point, which contains cones only. For these reasons 
it also follows that the peripheral regions of the retina lack 
all color vision. A colored object moved out far from the fixa- 
tion point must throw its lights on regions almost without cones ; 
it appears simply gray. Between the central regions, however, 
in which all colors are risible and the peripheral ones, where no 
color is seen, we find a zone of the retina in which red and gi'een 
are lacking, but yellow and blue are effective. It is well known 
that abou^ two per cent, of all men possess a retina which func- 
tions also in its central part like this. They are colorblind. They 
cannot recognize red and gTcen, and everything seems to them 
composed of yellow, blue, white and black. 

If we are to account for this difference between the central 
region where all colors are seen and the middle zone in which 
blue and yellow alone are risible, we cannot refer to any ana- 
tomical differences like those between cones and rods. There must 
be differences in the cones themselves, but these differences are not 
visible under the microscope. We are therefore confined to 
theories about their chemical constitution. We must consider 
it probable that the cones contain various chemical substances, 
each of which responds to ether waves of a certain length. 
The cones in the middle zone, for instance, perhaps contain 
only two such substances, one of which becomes excited 
by relatively long waves, producing in the brain the excite- 
ment which is accompanied by the yellow sensation, the 
other excited by relatively short waves, producing the blue 
sensation. 

But the facts would then at once suggest a further develop- 
ment of the theoiy. We know that blue and yellow mixed give 



84 PSYCHOLOGY 

gray. We might expect therefore that these two substances are 
only differentiations of the substance in the rods, so that, when 
both substances are excited at the same time, the same process 
results which arises in the rods from every kind of light waves. 
In the cones of the central region the chemical substances may 
have become still further differentiated. Substances which 
respond to ether waves from the red and the green part of the 
spectrum are developed, but if all four substances are working 
together, again we get the excitation which leads to the color- 
less gray sensation. A number of such chemical theories 
have been proposed. We cannot discuss their merits and 
their shortcomings here. They must be measured by the suc- 
cess with which they explain the facts of color mixing, of color 
after-images, of color contrasts, of adaptation to color and 
so on. 

The biological import of all these details of optical stimula- 
tion is evident. It is essential for the individual that he adjust 
his actions to the objects of his surroundings, not only with re- 
gard to the manifoldness of their forms, which colorless vision 
would impress on him, but also with regard to their richness of 
coloring. Yet it would be bewildering if everything which en- 
tered his sphere stimulated his brain with equal completeness. 
His reactions must be focused, and therefore his vision too must 
be most differentiated in the center of the field. The outlying 
objects must form only a general background, indicating where 
changes are going on. For this purpose it is advantageous to 
the psychocerebral mechanism if the side parts of the retina are 
widely expanded, but attuned only to colorless impressions. It 
is no less useful for the individual that neighboring fields pro- 
duce contrast effects, as by this the objects stand out from one 
another. Through the mechanism for color adaptation, the 
brain becomes independent of chance illumination, and can thus 
adjust itself correctly to the world of things whatever colored 
light may fall on it. By the working of the psychophysical 
law the mind can recognize the objects of the surroundings more 
easily. If it did not hold, every cloud before the sun would 
change the face of the things around us. Differences which we 
should notice in strong light would be swept away by the weaker 
illumination. 



STIMULATION 85 

b. AUDITORY STIMULATION 

The System of Sound Sensations. — As in the case of 
vision, the study of the psychophysical processes in the 
world of sound, too, may be approached directly from the 
side of consciousness. The biologist would simply ask on 
what sounds of the outer world the organism reacts, judg- 
ing from the outer behavior the cerebral effectiveness of the 
stimuli. The psychologist analyzes the inner experience 
first and then correlates it to the physical and physiological 
processes. The world of sounds to which the human mind 
adjusts itself evidently differs from that of the animals 
much more than the world of human vision from that on 
which animals react. Man and beast alike must regulate 
their actions with reference to the visible things around 
them, and it is only an incidental feature for most men that 
a fragment of that visible world consists of writing and 
printing, that is of symbols for actual things. The hear- 
ing of man, on the other hand, is rather little concerned 
with the sounds and noises which the things themselves 
produce and which are essential for the animal. The 
sounds which most often control the reactions of man are 
the sounds of speech which merely point to objects. 

Among men, however, it seems almost as if the audible 
world of the psychologist is of a particular order, inasmuch 
as he is accustomed to give even to this most important part 
in the realm of sound, to speech, no more attention than 
to the noises of the surrounding things, and instead to con- 
centrate all his interests on the tones of music. Yet this is 
not by chance. The tones can easily he brought into clear 
and definite series like the color sensatiotis; nothing simi- 
lar can be hoped for the host of noises. A simple grouping 
such as we found for the colorless light sensations is im- 
possible for the toneless sound sensations. Moreover the 
only promising approach to a better understanding of the 
noises comes through the study of the tones, and the psy- 



86 PSYCHOLOGY 

chologist is therefore justified in studying the system of 
tone sensations first of all. 

Yet it would be onesided to think of tones only in refer- 
ence to music. The demand for a biological interpretation 
must warn us against this. The musical use of tones evi- 
dently has no significance for the conservation of life. The 
ability to listen to a symphony does not help in the strug- 
gle for existence. Music is the only art which makes use 
of a material that has no bearing on our practical work. 
In the development of the animal race nature cannot have 
built up the psychophysical mechanism of tone hearing in 
order that man may hear the richness of sounds from 
musical instruments. The tones as elements of music are 
thus a psychophysical by-product, but there are tone ele- 
ments in most of the noises, and the vowels of our language 
are tone combinations, while only the consonants are true 
noises. 

If we try to bring order into the tones, we recognize 
easily three different directions in which the' impressions 
may vary. A singing voice sounds different from a whistle 
or from a violin, and these different from a trumpet or from 
a piano or from a bell or from a flute or from an organ 
pipe. This variation is technically called timbre. Every 
timbre, on the other hand, can be varied in the direction of 
lower and higher tones. If we pass over the keys of the 
piano from the left to the right, the specific piano timbre 
remains unchanged, but the tones pass from low to high. 
The low tone sensations appear massive, full, heavy, and we 
are readily inclined to perceive them as expansive, while 
the high tones appear thin, agile, light. The variation in 
this direction is called pitch. Finally each tone may change 
from strong to faint, from fortissimo to pianissimo. 

This threefold character of the change naturally sug- 
gests a comparison with the three dimensions of the visual 
sensations. If we consider only the psychological aspect, 
it Vv'ould seem most natural to treat the differences of 



STIMULATION 87 

timbre as the really fundamental differences of tones and 
to compare them, accordingly, with the variety of colors. 
The orchestra is a rainbow of sounds. The multitude of 
instrumental differences is as primary as the multitude of 
colors. The brightness difference from the darkest gray to 
the lightest then subjectively corresponds to the pitch dif- 
ference from the lowest tone to the highest, and the strength 
of the fully saturated color, decreasing to the point where 
the eolor'tone disappears, corresponds to the transition from 
the strong tone to the feeble. In practical life we work 
with such classifications. If we hear a single tone, we do 
not give our attention to its particular pitch. Very few 
persons, indeed, have the ability to recognize absolute pitch. 
But we do say it is a bell that rings or the sound of a 
voice or a trumpet tone or a whistle. The psychologist, 
however, prefers a less natural grouping of the three 
factors. He considers the pitch as fundamental, and com- 
pares the changes of pitch with the changes of color. In 
doing so he is influenced essentially not by the inner ex- 
perience, but by the relation of the tones to the physical 
stimuli. 

The Auditory Stimuli. — How can we correlate this 
three-dimensional system of tones to the sound excitement 
of the outer world? The normal sources of sound are air 
waves. The audible limits are about 20 vibrations for 
the lowest tones, about 50,000 for the highest. The tones of 
the piano, to be sure, lie within the much narrower limits 
of 30 and about 4,000. The just discriminable differ- 
ences of pitch are smallest in the middle regions of musi- 
cal hearing. An increase of one-fifth of a vibration can 
there be discriminated by a well-trained ear. In the region 
of the highest tones differences of several hundred vibra- 
tions are needed to make two neighboring tones distin- 
guishable. Nearly 10,000 steps may be discriminated be- 
tween the lowest and the highest tones by a good ear. This 
long scale of tones of different pitch is evidently not the 



88 PSYCHOLOGY 

scale of music. In the auditory pitch series, every tone 
finds a place when it shows a difference from its neighbor: 
in the musical pitch series only a limited number of spe- 
cially selected tone sensations are accepted. The physical 
principle of this selection is the simple arithmetical rela- 
tion of the tone waves. The octave is characterized by the 
relation of 1 to 2, the duodecim 1 to 3, the double octave 
1 to 4, the fifth 2 to 3, the third 4 to 5, the fourth 3 to 4, 
and so on. 

This description of the tones used in music is evidently physi- 
cal and not psychological. How can we select the musically 
valuable tones from the audible multitude by psychical features? 
Of course, we might refer to the pleasure which results from 
their sounding together, but this is an effect produced by the 
musical tones, not a characterization of the tones themselves. 
Here the conception of fusion offers itself. We saw that red 
and blue fuse in the violet, red and yellow in the orange, blue 
and green in the blue-green, with the result that each of the 
entering colors loses to some degree its independence and so 
blends with the other color that it is difficult to recognize the 
elements in the combination. Only by comparing them with the 
independent colors is their presence in the mixture felt. 

The tones of different pitch show a very different tendency 
to fuse with one another when they are together in our mind. 
Most of the audible tones interfere with one another or remain 
entirely separated, but others more or less fuse. The highest de- 
gree of fusion characterizes the octave. If an untrained observer 
hears two tones in the relation of 1 to 2, he is generally unable 
to recognize them as two tones at all. The two tones blend com- 
pletely into one. Next to it comes the double octave, then the 
fifth, then the third, with much smaller tendency to fusion, the 
fourth and the sixth. This fusion is strictly a mental experience, 
and it is indeed a sufficient condition for choosing a limited 
number of tones out of the tone series of audible sensations. 
Instruments like the organ or the piano are so built that no 
other tones but those which subjectively can be brought into 
combinations of fusion, and which physically show the simplest 



STIMULATION 89 

relations in the number of vibrations, can be produced. In 
the string instruments the whole scale of audible tones can be 
played, but the fingers which shorten the strings by pressing 
them down at definite points secure vibrations in those exact 
relations. The singer creates that same effect by exact contrac- 
tions of the muscles in the larynx. While the tones in the simplest 
relations fuse, tones which show only a small difference in the 
number of vibrations cannot sound together without a disturbing 
interference. If a tone of 500 vibrations is given together with 
one of 503, we hear three times in the second a swelling and 
sinking which is felt as an interruption; the so called beats. If 
their number increases, they give to the tones something rough; 
the beautiful smoothness of the tones is gone. 

The strength of the tone sensations corresponds to the 
amplitude of the air waves. The psychophysical law, 
which we found valid for light intensities, holds for tone 
intensities, too : the just perceivable differences of the sen- 
sations depend upon equal relations of the stimuli. A 
chorus of forty voices may need the adding of ten singers 
in order that the sound appear stronger. But for four 
voices, it is enough to have a fifth man, and a mighty 
chorus of four hundred would need one hundred more 
for the difference to be felt. 

The relation of timbre to the physical waves is more 
complicated. That whidh gives character to our musical in- 
struments cannot be, like the pitch and strength of the tone, 
connected with the length or height of the single waves. 
It always depends upon the combination of different waves. 
We saw that musical intervals exist between physical tones 
which stand in simple arithmetical relations. Musical in- 
struments are physical structures which never produce one 
physical tone alone, but always a combination of several 
such tones in simple arithmetical relations. The essential 
condition is only that these additional tones which have 
two times, three times, four times, five times and so on, 
more vibrations than the lowest tone be much weaker than 



90 PSYCHOLOGY 

this tone with the smallest number of vibrations. If it 
were otherwise, if we should hear, for instance, a tone of 
one hundred vibrations and with equal strength that of 
two hundred, three hundred and four hundred, we should 
really perceive a manifoldness of tones, however much they 
might fuse. It would be a musical chord. But if the tone 
of one hundred vibrations is strong, while those others are 
weak, our immediate impression is not that of a manifold- 
ness of tones combined in a chord, but that of one tone in 
a particular timbre. The mental effect of these weaker 
vibrations is not the impression of coordinated tones, but 
only that well-known shading of the lowest tone which gives 
the instrumental character. 

The best approach to these overtones is through the use of 
resonators, hollow bodies, which, when they are held before 
the ear, reenforce a particular overtone so much that it 
stands out from the combination which forms the timbre. 
Yet as soon as the tone is strengthened it is no longer the 
natural instrumental tone. As long as we leave the ele- 
ments in their natural intensities, we may recognize the 
parts, but this does not destroy the timbre character of the 
lowest element of the combination. Subjectively, the sig- 
nificant flavor of an instrumental tone remains, even if we 
discriminate elements in it, and thus the whole must be 
acknowledged as a psychological unit, while it is physically 
a complex combination. It is this complexity of the outer 
stimulus which makes the psychologist usually unwilling to 
accept the timbre as a basis for the classification of tones, 
and leads him to prefer the pitch. 

When we speak of combinations of tones, either in 
chords or in timbre, it would, of course, be a misunder- 
standing to fancy that the combined tones remain inde- 
pendent air waves. If the sound of a chord comes to us, 
we do not have some air particles which move in one rhythm 
and others in a second and again others in a third, but each 
air particle moves under the influence of all the vibrating 



STIMULATION 91 

bodies. The waves are combined, as the circles on a pond 
are combined when two stones are thrown into it. In the 
cases of the overtones, the sounding string itself combines 
the various movements. The complexity of such a com- 
bination becomes evident, if we think that we can hear a 
whole symphony through the telephone. The one vibrating 
telephone diaphragm must vibrate in such a complex 
rhythm that we can recognize all the various instruments 
in the orchestra. A combination of tones means, therefore, 
not a mere summation of simple regular waves, but the 
formation of complex waves. The characteristic feature is 
that, as long as we have to do with musical tone combina- 
tions, the resulting wave, however complex, remains a 
periodical one; that is, it repeats after a certain time ex- 
actly the same form, and the length of that time is given 
by the vibration of the deepest tone which enters. If the 
tones of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred and four 
hundred vibrations are combined in any relative intensity 
as chord or as timbre, the resulting w^ave repeats itself 
after every hundredth of a second. As soon as we 
no longer have to do with musical tone combinations, 
that is, if the vibrations which enter into the combi- 
nation do not stand in a simple arithmetical rela- 
tion, the physical product is an unperiodical air vibra- 
tion, and this is the external condition of most of the 
noises. 

All the continuous noises, all roaring and rumbling, 
rustling and hissing, buzzing and whispering, howling and 
rasping, consist of such unperiodical air waves. Only the 
sudden noises, the clicks and snaps and cracks, correspond 
to single, explosion-like air movements. Many of the noises 
by which the world tortures us are combinations of such 
continuous noise elements with successive sudden noise 
shocks. Not a few noises contain strong tone elements. 
If a piece of wood falls to the floor, we hear it as a noise 
only, but it is quite possible to cut a series of pieces of 



92 PSYCHOLOGY 

wood so that, if one after another is thrown to the floor, 
a distinct melody of tones results. 

The Ear — In the case of vision, when we had discussed the 
light sensations and the related external stimuli, we turned to 
the sense organ in order to understand the transition from the 
ether waves to the psychocerebral excitements. We must now 
raise the same question concerning the sound sensations and the 
physical sounds. How are they connected by the actions of 
the ear? The problem which is to be solved is clear. There 
must be an apparatus by which the various sound waves pro- 
duce various nervous excitements. If we take it for granted 
that the central processes for the different tones are excitements 
of locally different brain units, we must suppose that every 
tone of a special pitch reaches a special end organ in the ear 
and that its excitement is carried in a special nerve jfiber to a 
special cell in the brain. As we saw that we could discriminate 
ten thousand steps of pitch, ten thousand end organs would have 
to exist, each of which could pick up the waves of a particular 
rhythm. 

If this were realized, there would be no mechanical difficulty 
in the second demand which we must raise; namely, that these 
ten thousand end organs resolve the complex periodic waves 
into their elements, that h\ into all those simple tones which 
were combined in a chord or in a timbre. We saw that how- 
ever many simple waves may be superadded, they form together 
a periodic wave as long as the elements stand in simple arith- 
metical relations. But the physicist also knows the reverse. 
Every periodic wave, however complex, can be understood as a 
combination of elementary waves which stand in simple rela- 
tions. Theoretically, any chord or timbre wave can be resolved, 
accordingly, into a number of pure tones. The ear must have the 
analytic power to resolve the complex wave into these elements. 

The prevalent view is that all these tasks are fulfilled in the 
ear by sympathetic vibration. If we sing a tone in a room 
in which a piano is standing, the one piano string which gives 
the same tone responds by vibrating, while all the other strings 
remain at rest. Each vibrating body answers in this way to 
the waves of the surrounding medium, if they correspond to its 



STIMULATION 93 

own rhythm. If we had a harp of ten thousand strings, each 
one a little longer and heavier than the preceding, the longest 
moving in twenty vibrations in the second, the shortest in fifty 
thousand, every air vibration in the limits of hearing would 
start the movement of one of these wires. Just such a harp 
is contained in our inner ear. It is not actually a system of 
isolated wires, but a continuous, long, narrow membrane. Yet 
this membrane is held at its longer sides at such a tension that 
it can work mechanically as if thousands of parallel strips were 
stretched beside one another. The longest is about half a milli- 
meter, the shortest about the twelfth part. 

This suspended membrane must be reached by the sound waves. 
It is contained in a bone cavity which is formed like a snail 
shell, a spiral of two and one-half revolutions. The membrane 
divides this spiral tube into a lower and an upper passageway, 
which are connected with each other at the top. The whole 
ca\ity is filled with liquid. Each of the tubes contains at the 
bottom a little membranous window. If the one is pushed 
inward, the water in the whole system must be pressed and must 
push the other window outward. If the first, the so-called oval 
window, is brought into vibration, the whole liquid content must 
take up the rhythm and force itself in waves against the long- 
stretched membrane, in which the sympathetic vibration of the 
corresponding string results. The oval window receives its 
rhythmic movements from a stirrup-formed bone, and this is 
fastened to other small bones, the hammer and anvil, which 
lie on the inside of the ear drum. 

The air movement, which reaches the ear from without, pro- 
duces the vibration of the drum membrane, this transmits its 
movement to those three bones, and the stirrup drums its rhythm 
on the oval window, which pushes the liquid of the spiral cavity 
and reaches through it those fibers in the stretched membrane 
which respond sympathetically to the particular number of vibra- 
tions. Each of these fibers is in connection with a special nerve, 
and they all are joined in the big cable of the acoustic nerve, 
which leads to the brain and which carries each special fiber 
to a paiiicular brain cell. The excitement of this brain cell is 
accompanied by the tone sensation of the special pitch. The com- 
plex wave of the chord or the timbre is in this way resolved into 



94 PSYCHOLOGY 

its components. In the case of the noises the excitement is not 
confined to single strings in the membrane, but whole large parts 
of the membrane are pushed at the same time, and produce that 
vague effect in which the single tones are no longer heard. 

This whole theory has been attacked at its foundations re- 
cently, because it offers difficulties in the explanation of some 
subtle effects. It. seems, especially, not to account well for the 
difference tones, which the well-trained ear can easily find. 
Their pitch corresponds to a number of vibrations which is the 
difference between two objectively given sounds, a low humming 
tone which is musically of importance. The opponents of the 
theory that our hearing depends upon the principle of sym- 
pathetic vibration are rather inclined to think that the rhythm 
and complexity of the waves may be carried through the nerves 
themselves and may produce different qualities of excitements in 
the same brain center. The various tones would correspond then 
not to the vibrations of different brain cells, but to the various 
kinds of function in the same brain unit. There are many prac- 
tical difficulties in the way of such an idea. We know, for in- 
stance, the not infrequent pathological cases in which certain 
parts of the pitch scale are lacking. We can easily understand 
that the lowest or the highest or some middle part of the long, 
stretched membrane might be defective, and this corresponds to 
anatomical obsei-vations, but no other theory can give an account 
of such disturbances. 

Yet the more important argument is theoretical, and it throws 
light on the whole situation of psychophysical theories. This 
whole correlation between the mental and the anatomical physio- 
logical facts is not an object of discovery, but one of organiza- 
tion. A theory does not fulfill its purpose, if it simply explains 
a particular group of facts and does not adjust itself to the 
causah understanding of the totality of mental processes. The 
mere demand for psychophj^sical parallelism would, of course, 
be just as well satisfied if different tones corresponded to dif- 
ferent excitements in the same cell, as if they corresponded to 
the action of locally separated cells. Just as the diaphragm of 
the telephone can swing with so many variations that a whole 
orchestra can be heard through the vibrations of the one plate, 
any one brain cell too may receive a whole symphony. If the 



STIMULATION 95 

perception of tones alone were involved, the one theory might 
serve as well as the other. 

Bnt if we stand before the final decision, we must look much 
further. These tones enter into memorj' processes. We can 
reproduce a melody in our mind, and we shall soon see that 
this memory depends upon processes of association and that 
these associations can easily be understood, if they are explained 
by the action of nerve fibers which connect the locally different 
cells, but cannot be understood by a succession of different ex- 
citements. The theory of the harp in our ear will thus have to 
be accepted, unless the association processes too can be put upon 
an entirely new basis. 

c. THE LOWER SENSE STIMULATIONS 

Taste. — Taste, smell and touch are grouped as lower 
senses, compared with sight and hearing, since the world 
with which they bring us in contact is that of our bodily 
'interests only. Our intellect gets no stimulus through 
tongue, nose and skin which is comparable to that of words 
which we read or hear, and even our esthetic satisfaction 
from odors and tastes can hardly be compared with the 
enjoyment of true beauty through the visual and audible 
arts. The flavors of the meal are pleasant, but not beauti- 
ful. Yet this lower type of service is surely not unim- 
portant. The attractive taste and smell of the food, the 
disagreeable smell of that which is impure and poisonous, 
are strong hygienic regulations of our behavior. It is true 
that this psychophysical apparatus does not work perfectly. 
There are poisonous gases which do not smell, and a few 
poisonous chemicals which taste sweet, and even the alco- 
holic beverages, pleasant to the taste and smell of not a few, 
must be classed among the dangerous chemical substances. 
But on the whole, taste and smell tempt us and warn us 
in our biological interests, the one adjusted to the solids 
and liquids, the other to the gases which enter our 
oro:anism. 



96 PSYCHOLOGY 

The number of distinct elementary taste sensations is 
certainly very small. The endless variety of perceptions 
which we may gain by eating and drinking results from 
the manif oldness of combinations, and in these combinations 
the smell sensations show much greater richness of differ- 
ences than those of taste; and superadded are the tactual 
impressions, the temperature sensations and not least the 
impressions of our reaction movements in the mouth cavity. 
If our psychological analysis, especially when aided by 
exact experimental conditions, singles out the taste ele- 
ments, sweet, salt, sour and hitter remain the ultimate 
factors. Each of these four sensations can pass through 
various intensities. The claim that there is a special alka- 
line and metallic taste probably accredits to taste something 
which is a blending of taste and smell. The opposite claim 
that even sour and salt are not real tastes, but that they 
receive their characteristic content from combinations of 
taste with tactual and other sensations, seems not tenable 
either. It is true that salt brings an element of burning, 
and sour an element of contraction. But they can be 
recognized as effects of the tastes, not as parts of them, 
just as the pleasantness or unpleasantness is not itself a 
real part of the taste. The oily or soft or pricking effect of 
taste substances must also be separated from the real taste 
itself. The four taste qualities show a certain inner rela- 
tion not quite dissimilar to that of the four color sensa- 
tions. Especially if they are in moderate strength, they 
blend with one another and fuse in different degrees, and 
within certain limits they can neutralize one another. 
Sweet and salt, salt and bitter, sour and salt, sweet and 
bitter, diminish each other, if they are given in weak 
solutions. Moreover, similar to light, the taste sensation 
fades away when the stimulus continues. We become 
adapted ; a weak bitter taste cannot last long. The experi- 
ment proves that the adaptation to one taste may strengthen 
some of the other tastes. 



STIMULATION 97 

The physical stimulus which leads to the psychocerebral ex- 
citation of taste sensations is liquid substance; that is, any 
solid material must partially be dissolved by the saliva of the 
mouth in order to excite the end organs of the gustatory nerve. 
It does not seem possible to give a definite chemical characteriza- 
tion of those stimuli which produce the four tastes. Roughly 
speaking, the sensation of salt corresponds to those substances 
which the chemist calls salt, the sweet to the sugar, the sour 
to the acids, but these names themselves are evidently used in 
chemistiy on the basis of the taste impressions, neglecting the 
not rare exceptions in which an acid or a salt may appear taste- 
less or sweet. The sense organs are taste buds which lie in 
fungiform, foliated and circumvallate papillae. The nerve end- 
ings in those papillae may all respond only to one single kind 
of stimulus or to two or to three, to sugar, acid and salt alike; 
that is, taste bulbs of different function may be combined in a 
single papilla. The tip of the tongue, the edges of the middle 
part and the root are the chief taste regions, but it must be added 
that this is tnie only of the adult, as children have fully devel- 
oped taste sense all over the tongue and also in other parts of 
the mouth cavity. The prevalence of certain taste papillae in 
special regions is not without influence on characteristic motions 
of the face in tasting sweet or bitter substances, and these mo- 
tions again become so intimately related to the significant feeling 
tones of the tastes that we can trace the effects in many emo- 
tional exjDressions of the face. 

Smell. — As the small number of elementary colors con- 
trasts with the multitude of elementary tones, the quartette 
of tastes contrasts with the host of smell sensations. Yet 
while the thousands of tone sensations form one continu- 
ous series in which each stands between two others from 
which it is just perceptibly different, the smell sensations of 
man appear rather chaotic. They are, anyhow, probably 
scanty compared with those of some animals. The dis- 
crimination of smells by the dog can hardly be understood 
from the olfactory experience of man, whose erect position 
makes it biologically less iniDortant to depend upon scent. 



98 PSYCHOLOGY 

Nevertheless it is quite possible to form certain groups of 
the smell sensations of man. All kinds of flower fragrance 
have a certain similarity, and the odors of tea or vanilla 
would fall into the same group. They are quite different, 
for instance, from the odor of the various kinds of fruit or 
wine, and both again are widely separated from the nau- 
seous odors of decaying matter. Usually nine large groups 
are acknowledged, and each of them can be further sub- 
divided. 

If odors are combined, they can sometimes produce 
an entirely new impression in which the elements can 
hardly be recognized. More often a balancing effect re- 
sults; one smell neutralizes the other, at least for a short 
time. The most characteristic feature of the situation is 
the quick adaptation to smell. We cannot keep an unin- 
terrupted smell impression beyond a few minutes. As soon 
as we become adapted to a strong smell, similar smells are 
lost also, while others remain unchanged. The stimulus is 
always vaporous. A direct correlation between the sensa- 
tion and the atomistic constitution of the odorous sub- 
stances has not yet been reached. The end organs of the 
nerve lie in the highest part of the cavity of the nose. They 
are long thin cells, clustered together in a narrow region, 
somewhat aside from the chief respiratory passageway. 
They can be reached, of course, not only by particles of the 
air which we inspire, but also from the rear side from 
near the root of the tongue. If the professional tea taster 
wants to discriminate the various aromas he gargles the 
tea in order that the vapor may enter the nose cavity from 
behind. 

Touch. — The impressions of the so-called fifth sense 
have long been divided by psychophysiologists into pure 
touch sensations, temperature sensations, and pain sensa- 
tions. Compared with the richness of tactual impressions 
which the skin furnishes, it seems surprising that the 
analysis shows after all only one single quality of sensation 



STIMULATION 99 

in various degrees of intensity. We know how in extreme 
cases of blind deaf mutes the tactual sensations may become 
the vehicle to bring the highest civilization to their minds ; 
but we have only the one sensation, pressure, which begins 
with a slight feeling of contact and increases steadily. The 
manifoldness of apparently simple impressions results first 
from the spatial variations. The pressure upon a large 
area gives a different tactual feeling from pressure on a 
small spot without any conscious reference to the space. 
Moreover the contact at the forehead feels different from 
the contact at the finger; but the tactual quality may be 
the same, just as a color sensation is the same whether it 
comes from above or below. Secondly we receive many 
complex impressions as if they were tactual sensations of 
a specific kind. The smooth and the rough, the wet and 
the dry and the greasy give us significant touch sensations ; 
and yet we can easily become aware that they are not new 
tactual elements, but combinations. The interrupting of 
the tactual sensations, the combining with the temperature 
sensations, the feeling of resistance, and so on are responsi- 
ble for their mental structure. We have no independent 
touch sensations either when we discriminate light and 
heavy bodies ; we perceive their differences not only by the 
intensity of the pressure on the skin, but by the pressure of 
the deeper inner organs and by the muscular effort of 
lifting. 

A well-known phenomenon is the quick adaptation to 
tactual impressions. We are not aware of our clothes or of 
the chair on which we sit. The chief impression is always 
felt where two neighboring regions are under rather differ- 
ent pressures. The sense organs for touch are spread over 
the whole body, but they are distinct, isolated nerve ap- 
paratus. No touch sensation can be produced between these 
instruments in the skin, if the stimulus is sufficiently small 
and the pressure not so strong as to stimulate the neighbor- 
ing regions. In those parts of the skin where hairs can be 



100 PSYCHOLOGY 

found, and this refers by far to the greater part of the 
body 's surface, an end apparatus for tactual impressions is 
near the root of every single hair. But also in those regions 
of the skin where there is no hair, the little end organs are 
distinctly isolated. On an average about two hundred may 
be found to the square inch, but they are unevenly dis- 
tributed according to the biological needs of the different 
organs. 

Temperature. — ^While the tactual sensations show 
greater simplicity than the popular view would acknowl- 
edge, the temperature sensations are of more kinds than is 
usually supposed. We speak of one temperature sense 
which, as the mercury of a thermometer goes up and down, 
reacts with different intensities of temperature sensation. 
The psychologist, on the other hand, must separate the cold 
sensation and the warm sensation as fundamentally differ- 
ent, and has good reason to consider the hot sensation also 
as an impression qualitatively different from the warm and 
the burning pain. The introspection corresponds here to 
the physiological discovery that cold and warm sensations 
result from the action of entirely separate sense organs. 
Just as the tactual end organs are small isolated instru- 
ments, the end organs for cold and the end organs for 
warmth are distributed over the whole skin, about seventy 
cold spots on the average to the inch, and irregularly be- 
tween them a much smaller number of warm spots. 

If we move a cold pointed pencil slowly over a sensitive 
region, we feel the cold sensations flashing up from time 
to time, and between these points no sensitiveness for cold 
at all. Yet the temperature limits below which the cold and 
above which the warm sensations arise are not constant; 
they are shifting with the temperature of the whole skin in 
that region. The most surprising fact, however, is that 
the cold spots, which do not respond to luke-warm tempera- 
ture at all, awake a distinct cold sensation as soon as they 
are stimulated by a hot temperature. If a broad object 



STIMULATION 101 

of about fifty degrees Celsius touches the skin, the effect, 
accordingly, must be that it reaches many cold and many 
warm spots. The warm spots react with intense warm sen- 
sations and the cold spots with cold sensations. This irri- 
tating mixture of warmth and cold gives an apparently uni- 
fied impression of new character, that of heat. 

The skin is finally the bearer of a fourth kind of end in- 
struments, which are densely distributed over the whole 
body, the end organs for cutaneous pain sensations; they 
are more frequent than either touch or temperature organs. 
If a sharply localized stimulus like a needle point reaches 
such a spot, a thin little thrill can be felt distinctly dif- 
ferent from a mere tactual sensation, and if the stimulus 
is more severe, a really piercing pain results. They easily 
fuse with pressure sensations and are characterized by a 
tendency not to fade and to produce long after-effects. We 
shall have to return to the discussion of pain when we 
speak of internal stimulations, but it ought to be empha- 
sized from the start that the pain sensation in itself is in- 
dependent of the unpleasant feeling which is constantly at- 
tached to it. In common language we are inclined to call 
a pain a feeling, as a pain which we get from being cut 
or burned is always strongly accentuated by this feeling re- 
action, while a color or a smell or a tone may be pleasant or 
unpleasant or indifferent. Yet the mere regularity of the 
connection does not change the character of the sensation. 
As we separate the tone sensations from their pleasantness 
or a foul smell sensation from its unpleasantness, we ought 
to consider the pain sensation, too, at first strictly as a 
sensation, and abstract from the subjective element of our 
disliking it. 

d. INTERNAL STIMULATION 

Movement Sensations. — The sensory functions of the 
organism appeared to us as the first part of the processes 
in the sense organ-brain-muscle arc; they start the com- 



102 PSYCHOLOGY 

plex brain excitements which ultimately result in motor 
impulses to action. But these actions cannot really 
serve all biological needs of the individual, if the 
sensory impressions on which they are based are con- 
fined to that which goes on outside the body. The sensorial 
stimulations which come from within the body must in- 
fluence the central and centrifugal processes as much as the 
messages from without. A fatigue sensation in our 
muscles, a hunger sensation in our stomach, a pain sensa- 
tion in our head, may influence the central arc processes 
still more than colors or . sounds. In principle there can 
be no difference between the excitements which are carried 
to the sensorial centers when the sense organ lies in the skin 
or when the sense organ lies in the joints or between 
the muscles or when the nerve itself becomes irritated. 
Those internal stimulations cannot show the abundant 
manifoldness of the world of sight and sound, nor do they 
offer an equal sharpness and distinctness of quality and 
of local difference. Moreover the difficulty which they pre- 
sent to a subtle study of the relations between the mental 
states and the physical stimuli is naturally much greater. 
Yet we must survey at least some specimens of these groups. 
The psychologically most important stimulation from 
within is that which results from the movements of the 
body. Whenever we are acting, we receive impressions 
from our moving members. We may mostly ignore them, 
just as we usually disregard sensations of our skin. But 
as soon as we turn our attention to our walking or lifting 
or writing or speaking, we become well aware of the mani- 
foldness of impressions which result from the activities. 
Even movements like those in respiration or convergence 
of the eyeballs may become noticeable. The importance of 
these sensations for the structure of mental life is funda- 
mental. We shall find sensations of this group prominent 
when we come to the analysis of space and time perception, 
of attention and emotion and, above all, of the conscious- 



STIMULATION 103 

ness of the self and the will. Yet these sensations them- 
selves offer rather little to the observer. 

We may discriminate two qualitatively different elements, 
the movement sensation and the tension sensation. The 
movement sensation, which is related to the real change of 
position, may result from passive as well as from active 
movements. Its intensity varies very slightly; it even 
seems doubtful whether we have a right to speak at all of 
different intensities of the movement sensation. The ex- 
perience of weaker or stronger bodily movement is 
very complex: tension sensations and tactual impressions 
are combined there with the muscle sensations, and 
the muscle sensation itself usually becomes expanded 
over larger fields and lengthened in time when the move- 
ment grows. But a muscle sensation does not change its 
quality or intensity by being spread out in space and time, 
just as a color sensation is not changed by filling a greater 
area and a longer interval. 

The sense organs which are stimulated by the movements are 
probably twofold. There are sensitive end organs in the joints. 
As every movement of our legs or arms or fingers involves rota- 
tions on the bones of the joints, these end organs must be af- 
fected by the muscle contractions. When we bend our limbs 
ourselves or when they are passively bent without our muscle 
contraction, the angle at which a change is just noticeable re- 
mains the same in both cases. This suggests indeed that the 
elbow or the knee or the wrist are the sources of the sensation. 
This is still more directly proved by the fact that the discrimina- 
tion of active movements is greatly hindered when a galvanic 
current through the joint decreases the sensitiveness of these 
joint sense organs. Yet we are aware of our movements also 
in parts of the bodj^ where no joints exist. We notice the motions 
of our tongue and lips and cheeks and eyeballs. Moreover, even 
in passive joint movements pressure and tension on the muscles 
themselves are unavoidable. Probably not only the joints but 
the muscles too contain internal sense organs; they are stimulated 



104 PSYCHOLOGY 

by the pressure which the contracting muscles exert on them. 
In any case the sensation is caused by the movement itself and not 
by the position of the muscles. It is certainly wrong to inter- 
pret the movement impression as a perception of successive posi- 
tions. On the contrary we become aware of the position by the 
perception of movement. The mere position of the limbs in 
complete rest gives no characteristic sensation. 

The tension sensation is very similar to the movement sensa- 
tion, and yet can be distinguished. Here we may speak of dif- 
ferent intensities, corresponding to the increasing physical ten- 
sion. It is the tension sensation which informs us most directly 
whether the weights we lift are light or heavy, distinct from 
the movement sensation which tells us whether we lift the 
weights through a long or a short distance. If we try to move 
our limbs and are prevented, the pulling or pushing is again 
signaled to us by the tension sensation. The decrease of this 
tension is felt as a relaxation. The chief sense organs are here 
probably in the tendons by which the muscles are attached to 
the bones. Both the tension and the movement sensations 
resemble the contact sensations of the skin. Sensory nerves in 
the muscles are also the sources of the sensations of fatigue. It 
is an after-effect of long or strong muscle contraction. The 
lower degrees of this stimulation disappear if active movement 
sets in. Its higher degrees shade into muscular pain sensations. 
Both the movement and the tension sensations are covered by 
the much used term kinesthetic sensations. 

As an appendix to the movement sensations that group of 
internal stimulations which secures the consciousness of head 
movements must be considered. If we turn our head upward, 
downward, right or left, or if our head moves with our whole 
body in walking or dancing or in moving by elevator or train, 
we notice every change of position and respond very coiTectly 
by eye movements and other reactions. The sense organ for this 
stimulation is a system of three semicircular canals connected 
with the inner ear. These canals are perpendicular to one 
another. As soon as the head changes from rest to movement 
or changes the rate of movement, the liquid in the canals pro- 
duces changes of pressure on the walls and stimulates the nerve 
fibers. If the rate of the movement is constant, no stimulation 



STIMULATION 105 

occurs. We do not feel the forward or backward movement on 
a smoothly running train. Only the change produces the ex- 
citement. 

Feeling Sensations. — Another group of internallj^ stim- 
ulated sensations, most important from a biological point of 
view, contains pain and lust. The one is constantly accom- 
panied by an attitude of disliking, the other by an atti- 
tude of liking, but their qualitative contents can be con- 
sidered independent of these subjective responses. We 
found cutaneous pain among the sensations which are ex- 
cited from without and recognized that specific sense 
organs in the skin, distinct from the organs of touch and 
temperature, transmitted the excitement to the central 
nervous system. The unquestionable existence of special 
sense organs for pain in the skin suggests that the internal 
organs also are provided with special localized pain trans- 
mitters. Thus the pain of a muscular cramp may result 
from the excitement of specific nerves, and not simply from 
an abnormal overexcitement of those nerves which give us 
the movement sensation of the muscles. 

It is well known, moreover, that pain irritations are not 
transmitted to the brain in the same paths of the spinal 
cord by which the tactual sensations are conducted. The 
pain may arrive in the brain considerably later than the 
touch, and may be eliminated while the touch remains. 
Many parts of the body are provided only with pain 
nerves. We do not become aware of these organs at all 
until an abnormal disturbance occurs. Not a few parts of 
the inner body are even without instruments for signaling 
disturbances. The intestines, for instance, can be cut or 
burned without pain ; pain sets in only when the surround- 
ing peritoneum becomes affected. Yet, while the body is 
provided with specific pain receivers, it is probably true 
that every severe injury to sensory nerves can lead to pain 
sensations, too. Finally the disturbance may occur quite 



106 PSYCHOLOGY 

close to the sensory center of the brain region itself. An 
oversupply or undersupply of blood may cause head- 
ache. The typical sensation of lust starts from the sense 
organs of the sexual apparatus, when it enters into hyper- 
emic conditions. 

But pain and lust are not the only bodily sensations 
which on account of their intimate connection with liking 
and disliking are usually called feeling sensations. The 
conscious experience contains a variety of other qualities 
which must be classified in the same group. There are im- 
pressions of bodily comfort or discomfort, mostly spread 
over large regions, vaguely localized and fusing with many 
other sensations, especially kinesthetic and tactual sensa- 
tions. Some, like hunger, stand on the border between 
discomfort and pain. We know to-day that the pang of 
hunger results from sharp contractions of the muscles of 
the empty stomach. Thirst, on the other hand, results from 
dryness of the mucous membrane and stands nearer to 
tactual and kinesthetic sensations. Other qualities are 
those of nausea or suffocation. In the group of the pleas- 
ant feeling sensations, tickling sensations and even the 
sensation of relief from itching, the sensation after satisfy- 
ing the appetite, and of resting after fatigue, have a cer- 
tain similarity to organic lust sensations. 



CHAPTER YIII 
ASSOCIATION 

After-effects in the Nerve Centers. — We have surveyed 
so far the sensations which the surrounding world excites 
in the nervous system. In the lowest form of animal 
life, all the reactions are controlled by such sense impres- 
sions. The physical or chemical stimulus awakes a move- 
ment of approach or withdrawal, and the biological in- 
terests of the organism are sufficiently served by it. But 
we saw that the higher animals can survive only if the re- 
actions are the results not onlj^ of present stimuli, but also 
of the earlier stimulations. If the past experiences of the 
individual can work together with the present ones in 
guiding the actions, the organism will become adjusted to 
a world of things far beyond the immediate reach of the 
senses. In man's life the present impressions are merely 
a small fraction of the contents of mind which control his 
actions. His whole past cooperates with the present sur- 
roundings. Hence our next problem must be: how can 
the sensorial excitements of the past be made active again ? 
On the mental side, it is a question of the reawaking of 
earlier sensations. 

We start again from the bodily apparatus, as we have 
agreed that we can find an explanation only on the physical 
side. 

Recent experiments of the biologists have demonstrated 
that even the lowest animals show a certain modifiability 
of their behavior. If a sea anemone is stimulated, the re- 
action after the fiftieth stimulation will be different from 
that after the first; every impression left some traces. 
But with the lower animals this ability is very rudimen- 
tary; the older view was therefore that they cannot learn 

107 



108 PSYCHOLOGY 

at all. If we come to the higher animals this ability in- 
creases rapidly and is developed not only in the brain but 
also in the lower parts of the central nervous system. 

If we take a frog, the head of which has just been cut, 
we can perform the following experiment. We dip one 
of its legs into a strong acid solution, and we see that it at 
once contracts as if to throw off the acid from the skin. 
The stimulus goes from the toes to the sensory center in the 
spinal cord, and the excitement there is strong enough to 
produce the useful motor reaction. But if we take instead 
a very weak acid solution and dip one leg of the dead 
frog into the liquid, the stimulus is too weak; no motor 
reaction follows. We try it again and again; everything 
remains undisturbed. But if we dip it perhaps the 
tenth time, we see the beginning of a little twitching in 
the leg, and when we come to the fourteenth or the fif- 
teenth time, the leg may react with a complete contraction. 
The fifteenth dipping was not different from the first, but 
the sensorial impression in the center was this time strong 
enough to excite the response, because the fourteen pre- 
ceding excitements had been summed up in the sensorial 
center of the spinal cord until the accumulated stimuli be- 
came effective. Thus those nerve cells in the spinal cord 
of the dead frog have '^memory." This power to gen- 
erate after-effects in the nerve centers is most fully de- 
veloped in the higher brain centers. 

The after-effect, however, is not a mere continuation of 
the sensory excitement. On the contrary, we know from 
the conscious experiences that the cerebral excitement ends, 
on the whole, with the stimulus. If the sensation did not 
stop when the sense organ process ends, our life interests 
would be badly served. How could we hear music or speech 
if one tone were to continue its excitement in the brain, 
while the second was coming in. If the snapping noises 
of electric sparks follow one another twenty times in a 
second, we can still discriminate them easily from a con- 



ASSOCIATION 109 

tinuous noise. Each snap excites a sensation only for the 
short time of the impression itself. To be sure, stimulations 
which produce chemical action in the sense organ like light 
and taste and odor develop after-images, but these depend 
upon the prolonged process in the sense organ itself. The 
kinematographic pictures do not flicker if we get seven 
different views in a second, because each leaves an after- 
image which bridges over the interruption in which no 
picture reaches the eye. But this is an eye process, not a 
brain process. If we look at an incandescent lamp, then 
switch it off, we can see it still for a long while in the dark 
room, but it will follow every movement of our eyes. And 
after it has faded away, if we rub the eyeball, it will come 
again. In short, the direct after-image depends upon 
peripheral processes and not upon the lasting of the central 
excitement. The brain cell comes to rest and the sensation 
ends when the excitement in the sense organ stops. 

To be sure, a c'ertain perseverance of a central excite- 
ment is possible and is familiar to everyone. A melody 
may haunt us and may push itself again and again into 
consciousness without any apparent cause; a disagreeable 
scene which we witnessed may at any time break into our 
mind anew. It is as if the central excitement were con- 
tinuing, and while it is suppressed by other impressions or 
activities, it makes itself noticeable whenever it has a 
chance. A feeling sensation, especially, may linger with 
us, and a mood may remain when its cause is no longer 
active. The persevering of processes may even develop 
into almost continuous mental images, fixed ideas may 
torture the individual and follow him through years. But 
it is evident that all such occurrences of central perseve- 
rance interfere with the normal life interests. They are 
disturbing by-products of the central apparatus. The per- 
fectly efficient mind would not be troubled by fixed ideas 
and would shake off the moods when their cause had 
disappeared, and would not be molested by recurring 



no PSYCHOLOGY 

images and melodies, if no interest is attached to tliem. 
This form of mere continuation of the central excitement 
has abnormal character, or is at least a deficiency, however 
easily it may occur to a slight degree in the normal mind. 

The after-effect of earlier stimulations, in order to serve 
the ends of the individual, must be very different from a 
mere persevering of the impression. If the past experiences 
of the organism are to be helpful in the guidance of action, 
they must make themselves effective not by a haphazard 
eruption but by such a reappearance as may really enlarge 
the present impressions. Nothing would be gained for the 
animal, if a pain or a pleasure of the past were acci- 
dentally to break into consciousness again, but everything 
is gained, if a consciousness of the earlier pain arises at the 
sight of the enemy which brought the pain once before, and 
the consciousness of pleasure at the sight of the place where 
food was found before. The one can now stir up the useful 
impulse to escape before new harm is done, and the other 
can reenforce the impulse to approach, for which the mere 
sight impression might be insufficient. If a hissing sound 
or a scent can bring back to the animal 's mind the whole 
scene in which the same sound or the same smell once be- 
fore played a role, the reaction is no longer confined to the 
present stimulus, but can now respond to the total setting, 
of which nothing but that one signal has actually reached 
the sensory centers. We call this association. The noise 
sensation is associated with the visual image of the scene in 
which it occurred before. 

This principle of association controls the memory of 
man; it opens unlimited possibilities of supplementing the 
present experiences by reproductions. The sound of a horn 
on the street awakes in us the image of an automobile, and 
helps us to avoid, not the sound which we actually hear, 
but the visual object which we have not yet seen, but which 
we have often seen before, when we heard the warning 
sound. And step by step we might procee<J from such 



ASSOCIATION 111 

trivial connections of sound and thing to the most complex, 
where the sight of a printed name may awake in us the 
condensed experiences of years of traveling or of com- 
panionship or of reading. The actual impression may then 
be only an infinitesimal fraction of that whole excitement 
in the psychocerebral system which becomes the basis for 
our further action. Everj^ reproduction, moreover, which 
is stirred up by this associative process then becomes itself 
an actual central excitement, and as such again the starting 
l^oint for new associations. One impression may thus bring 
to life ever new groups of past excitations. 

Association by Contiguity. — The biological interests of 
the individual thus demand that an earlier excitement 
be reproduced only together with some other excite- 
ment with which it was actually combined in a previous 
experience. This earlier combination may have been a si- 
multaneous or a successive one. In any case the impressions 
must have been contiguous in consciousness. They may 
belong to the same group of sensations ; the beginning of a 
melody may bring back the further tones. Or they may 
be of different groups in the same sense sphere ; the melody 
may bring back the words with which it was sung. Or they 
may belong to two different senses; the melody may bring 
back the visual opera scene. The smell of iodoform may 
arouse hospital experience with its images, its conversa- 
tions, its discomforts. Here we have the fundamental law 
of association before us. If two impressions have come to 
the psychocerebral apparatus together or in immediate suc- 
cession, the later reappearance of the one brings with it a 
reproduction of the other. 

How can we explain this process ? We know that a real 
causal explanation has to link the physical parts of the 
psychoph^'sical events. If we reduce the process to its 
simplest scheme, we should have, accordingly, on the physi- 
cal side the central excitements in the two brain units, 
A and B. If later A is stimulated through the sense organs 



112 PSYCHOLOGY 

again, some physiological process occurs by which B be- 
comes excited, too, or vice versa. We are evidently obliged 
to suppose that by the first excitement the connecting path 
between A and B underwent some change, so that it be- 
came a path of reduced resistance between the two brain 
units. A and B may be the same as they were before the 
earlier experience, but the pathway from A to B has been 
altered. If A alone had been first excited, the process 
would not have irradiated beyond its cell substance, but if 
a path from A to B exists, which by previous psychophysi- 
cal processes has become a path of least resistance, the 
nervous reverberation of A will extend to B and secure the 
reexcitement in B. This is indeed all that is needed. We 
have a causal explanation of the elementary association 
process, if we can expect that the simultaneous excitement 
of A and B will change the constitution of the path which 
connects them, so that in future a stimulation of one of the 
two end stations of this path will be carried over to the 
other end station. The physical process in A is accom- 
panied by sensation a and the physical excitement in B is 
accompanied by sensation h, and the result is that while 
directly the new excitement of A produces a reexcitement 
of B, indirectly the sensation a causes the reproduction of 
the sensation h. 

No doubt such a theory cannot be directly proven by 
anatomical or physiological demonstration. But it is so 
simple and explains such an abundance of phenomena that 
since the days of the eighteenth century it has offered itself 
as the most convincing principle of physiological psy- 
chology. It provides such a direct explanation that the 
effort to understand the causal actions of the mind was for 
a long while essentially a demand to reduce all mental ac- 
tivities to psychophysical associations. Moreover both the 
anatomical and the physiological facts seem to harmonize 
the better with this theory, the more we know their details. 
The theory involves the existence of nerve paths between 



ASSOCIATION 113 

any two sensory centers, as associations can be formed be- 
tween any two possible impressions. This was an almost 
fantastic hypothesis in earlier times. But modern anatomy 
has furnished a broad basis for this claim. The new 
methods of making the ramifications of the brain cells 
visible under the microscope have disclosed such endless 
complexity of interconnections that the mere numerical de- 
mands of the theory offer no difficulty. Besides this, the 
physiology of the brain leaves hardly any doubt that large 
clusters of brain cells exist which do not serve any sen- 
sory or any motor function, but are only connecting links 
between the sensory or motor cells. Through their inter^ 
mediation any central unit may indeed be connected with 
any other unit, and the mediating path which was neutral 
before, may have become altered when its two end stations 
were simultaneously excited. 

Finally, there is no lack of observable facts which in- 
dicate that the nervous paths do indeed become changed by 
functioning. Every act of training, every motor habit, 
shows that the nerve paths are no longer the same after 
performing a certain function. A disposition remains to 
perform it more easily. A physical-chemical alteration 
has occurred by which the resistance is altered, until the 
motor response becomes automatic. The forming of as- 
sociations is in this respect similar to the forming of 
habits. We may suppose that if A and B are excited 
together, the shortest nerve path which connects them 
really carries a certain excitement to and fro, and that 
this prepares the nerve fibers for their later service of 
association. 

Association by Similarity. — If the associative process is 
to serv^e the needs of life, its w^orking must not be confined 
to some solitary A and B or even to some A to Z, but 
millionfold connections must be formed. Every complex 
image contains many thousand elements in itself. The 
discussion of the principle of association may refer to 



114 PSYCHOLOGY 

single elements, but practical experience always shows 
whole groups bound to other groups. This must have im- 
portant consequences. Not all elements will be contained in 
the new experience. Some more or less important parts 
may be lacking, and yet the remaining ones may start the 
associative process. If we have connected a name with 
the sight of a girl, we shall associate the name with 
her even if we meet her the next time in a blue dress in- 
stead of a green one. The material of the object may have 
been entirely replaced^ yet the impressions which we re- 
ceived of its forms may still be sufficient to start the right 
associations. If we have connected a painter's name with 
a painting, his name will come to our mind also if we 
see a photograph of the painting. Not a single color 
impression is left there, but the form relations supply 
the essential experience for the association. The melody 
which we heard from a human voice will be associated with 
the words of the text, when we hear it whistled. Even 
the small drawing may bring to mind our previous ex- 
perience in the midst of the landscape which it 
represents. 

In the same way not only the associating but also the 
associated group may have lost a number of its elements 
or replaced them by others. A word may bring before our 
mind the landscape, but while we recognize that it is the 
seashore or the mountain which we saw before, it may lack 
every color element ; and indeed not a few are unable to as- 
sociate visual images otherwise than as gray. Many details 
may also have been forgotten; others which did not 
originally belong to the first inipression may creep in. 
Moreover the object of association may have been fre- 
quently before our mind, every time somewhat changed. 
"We may have seen a person in many costumes and in many 
positions, and if his name associates itself with his 
memory, we may think of him as he appeared at a certain 
moment, but we may just as well mix elements of different 



ASSOCIATION 115 

times and combine them in a new picture which does not 
correspond exactly to any previously experienced one. 

If two groups of impressions differ in some essential 
elements and yet are sufficiently alike to enter into the 
same associative connections, we call them similar. It is 
useful to us to have the associated ideas arise also if not the 
original impression but a similar one comes to our mind. 
It must therefore be a valuable auxiliary function, if any 
impression can awake in us first simply a similar combina- 
tion of elements which we experienced before. If an ani- 
mal which we have never seen stirs up in our mind the 
picture of a similar animal which we have seen before, we 
can later perform the right reaction, as the idea of the 
animal which we saw before will arouse all the associations 
which we previously gathered. The richest enlargement 
of our present sense sphere will thus be gained if our im- 
pressions awake not only the idea of those objects to 
v/hich they were contiguous before, but if they also sug- 
gest similar objects of earlier experience. In other words, 
what the psychophysical individual needs to make the 
past cooperate with the present in the control of his ac- 
tions is not only association by contiguity but also by 
similarity. 

From all which we have discussed, it is easy to see that 
association by similarity does not really involve a new 
psychophysical principle. We recognized that similarity 
means a community of parts. There must be something in 
common between two similar faces or two similar land- 
scapes or two similar novels. In the two similar faces the 
eyes may be quite different, but the mouth and the nose 
and the chin and the forehead may be the same. If there 
were no essential parts alike, there would be no similarity. 
But this means that the mouth and the nose which we see 
now contiguous to blue eyes were seen in an earlier experi- 
ence contiguous to brown eyes. If the face with blue eyes 
awakes in us by similarity association the memory of a 



116 PSYCHOLOGY 

face with brown eyes which we saw years ago, we have 
practically only the principle of contiguity applied once 
more. The present face was never together with the 
earlier face, but essential features of it were together with 
different elements in the past experience. They form the 
starting point for the associative process, and therefore 
the one complex object brings to our mind the other similar 
one. Only through this constant intertwining of similarity 
association and contiguity association, both ultimately 
based on the same elementary principle, the psychophysi- 
cal mechanism reaches that marvelous power of adjust- 
ment which makes use of every earlier life event at every 
new step forward. 

The Character of the Reproduction. — We have tried to 
understand the processes of association by recognizing 
their biological usefulness. But under this point of view 
one more demand is unavoidable. The associated repro- 
duction must somewhat be different, after all, from the 
effect of actual sense stimulation. If this were not the 
case, there would be no chance to discriminate between the 
present impressions and the associated reappearance of the 
past, and if we could not distinguish between them, we 
should lose all consciousness of reality, we should con- 
fuse the present with that which has disappeared. Our 
actions would lack adjustment to the surroundings. To 
be sure, we know cases where all this does occur, where 
certain associations have the character of real perceptions, 
but they are the hallucinations and illusions, which must 
be treated as symptoms of a diseased brain. The in- 
dividual who really hears voices or sees persons where no 
actual sense impression is given, must come into conflict 
with the demands of life and cannot be held responsible. 
He needs protection behind the walls of an asylum. 

The normal man can experience associations with the 
immediacy of sense impressions without harm only if he 
is deprived of the chance to act. This is the case in sleep, 



ASSOCIATION" 117 

and it is therefore without danger that the associations 
which arise as dreams possess the life character of true 
outside impressions. And one other condition makes such 
sensorial freshness of the associations harmless or even 
useful, namely, when they fill out the blanks of percep- 
tion. We gain through hearing and seeing and touching 
merely a part of the outer stimuli to which our actions 
respond. Our habitual associations fill out the gaps. It 
is difficult for us to discover the misprints in a proof sheet, 
because we do not see the actual letters; we replace them 
by the correct ones, which the other letters in the word 
demand and give to the associated impression the hallucina- 
tory character of real perception. But if we abstract from 
these cases, we do discriminate between a real impression 
and an associative reproduction. We may remember the 
friend as he was sitting next to us, remember also his 
voice; and yet we do not believe that we actually see and 
hear him. Only through this psychological difference, 
which, of course, must be also a psychophysical one, can 
the play of association reach its practical usefulness. 

It is impossible to characterize this difference between 
the sense impression and its imagined reproduction other- 
wise than by referring to the experience which is at every- 
one's disposal. We certainly have no right to call it a dif- 
ference of intensity. The remembered white light does 
not become a dark gray, the remembered fortissimo does 
not become pianissimo, the remembered cold temperature 
does not become warm. On the contrary we are able to 
recognize in our associated image all the original differ- 
ences of strength. We hear the symphony in our memory 
picture with all the shades of strength. Even impressions 
which in actual perception are just above the threshold of 
discrimination remain noticeable in our inner reproduction. 
It would be meaningless to say that the memory of a 
thunderstorm has less intensity of noise than the actual 
impression. If we remember it at all, we remember it with 



118 PSYCHOLOGY 

all the strength of its noise. Yet it is incomparable with 
the actual hearing of the thunder. We should never in our 
most vivid reminiscence confuse it with the faintest sound 
which we really hear. 

Nor have we a right to say that the associated image is 
less clear. Certainly many reproductions are vague, but 
many actual impressions are vague too ; and above all we 
may remember an earlier scene with the subtlest details 
and sharpest outlines. Nor can we say that it is more 
changing, more labile, more fleeting. Many associated 
ideas resist every mental influence and last unchanged 
much longer than most of our sense impressions. Nor, 
finally, have we the right to say that the difference is one 
of vividness. The sense impressions to which our atten- 
tion is turned are vivid in our mind, while many other per- 
ceptions may be at the lowest degree of vividness. On the 
other hand any of our associated ideas may reach the 
strongest degree of vividness, our whole attention may be 
focused on them, they may deeply impress us, and yet 
lack that character of the direct sense impression. The 
distinction between real seeing, hearing, touching and feel- 
ing and the associated reproduction of such contents is 
not a matter of the difference of vividness or intensity or 
clearness. 

Yet we have no right, as has sometimes been proposed, 
to locate the immediate sensation and the reproduced one 
in different brain parts. We recognized that under cer- 
tain conditions, as in dreams or in filling the blanks of 
our perceptions, the associated material can gain the full 
freshness of sense excitement. No less decisive is the fact 
that the reproduced contents enter into all the connections 
which the original impressions formed. The associated 
idea itself at once becomes the center for all the associa- 
tions which had been formed with the original perception. 
It can also arouse exactly the same feelings, not only the 
higher affections, as joy or sadness, but even the immediate 



ASSOCIATION 119 

bodily sensation feelings. The associated idea may easily 
stir up nausea or appetite or sexual lust. In short, the re- 
produced excitement can so completely take the place of 
sense experience that it would be an utterly uneconomic 
way of thinking, if we burdened the psychophysical theory 
with the hypothesis that sense excitement and reproduction 
go on in locally different regions of the brain. A most 
complicated duplication of nerve connections would be 
necessary. 

Moreover, if we perceive an object for the second time 
and recognize it, it would mean, according to such an 
hypothesis, that the present impression associates itself 
wath the reproduction of the earlier impression of the same 
thing, and Xve should have two distinct contents : the room 
as we see it now, and the room as we saw it last year. But 
nothing of that kind can be found in experience. If we 
see the room for the second time, a feeling of acquaintance 
arises and associations of people whom we met in the room 
may come to consciousness. But last year's impression of 
the room does not stand out from the new impression as 
a copy. The most natural theory is then that impression 
and reproduction arise in th& same train cells. Of course, 
inasmuch as the characteristic difference exists in con- 
sciousness, we must postulate some difference in the brain 
process, too. We are thus forced to suppose that the 
chemical process in the brain cell is not the same, when it 
results from associative processes as when it is stirred up 
from peripheral sense organs. 

Conditions of Association. — Each element, and even 
each group of elements, stands in associative relations to 
many others. A name, a word, even a smell, may suggest 
numberless experiences of the past. If all were rushing 
to consciousness, chaos would result. AYhich associations 
actually are resounding depends upon many factors. Some 
of them are familiar to everyone. We all know that the 
connections which come most frequenthj into our life offer 



120 PSYCHOLOGY 

themselves very readily for reproduction. But we know 
also that those which were most recently in the sphere of 
our experience have the most favorable chance. What we 
learned yesterday comes more easily to our mind than 
what we connected in our experience some months ago. 
Everybody is also aware that our memory connects very 
firmly those impressions which belong to an especially im- 
pressive and emotionally important situation. 

We might reduce the facts to a simple laboratory ex- 
periment. We show to the subject a series of ten squares 
of differently colored paper. In presenting one after an- 
other, we recite with every one a two-digit figure, and 
afterward we show the whole set of colors side by side, 
and ask him to write the figures which were associated 
with them. But we may introduce the following varia- 
tion. One of the color number pairs may be repeated, and 
one of them made impressive by using a three-digit figure. 
If we try this with a large number of persons, we find 
that the number which was last, the number which was re- 
peated and the number which gave a surprise, are far more 
often remembered than any of the others. By careful ex- 
periments we can show the relative value of those three 
methods of association. The results also indicate that the 
pair which is given first in the series has a certain addi- 
tional chance. This points to a fourth principle. Besides 
frequency and importance, the newness of a connection, 
which characterizes the beginning of a series, also offers 
strong chances for the reproduction. In every group of 
life experiences that which comes early influences our 
memory almost as much as that which comes last. 

But we have not spoken of one condition, which may be 
practically the most important. The psychologists call it 
by the technical term constellation. As long as we con- 
sider an association as the result of one excitement only, 
we are dealing with abstractions. We never have only one 
starting point in our mind. Many impressions and ideas 



ASSOCIATION 121 

are combined in us, and it is their constellation which de- 
termines the selection of the newcomer. Any word in a 
sentence might stir up scores of associations, if it were 
isolated. But as soon as it stands in the sentence, those 
possible companion words do not appear in consciousness 
at all. Out of the whole circle of possibilities every word 
pulls with it only those associations which harmonize with 
all the other words. The word may even have a double 
meaning ; yet in the midst of the phrase only the one mean- 
ing which fits the whole situation comes to the mind. 

But this evidently has also a negative side. If the vari- 
ous words in the sentence cooperate so that they demand 
only one of many associations, it means that they sup- 
press the others, that they inhibit them, that they do not 
allow their appearance. This negative function of inhibi- 
tion and suppression accompanies the positive factor of as- 
sociation at every step. And finally, can we really speak of 
our associations as if they were only reproductions of sense 
impressions and ignore the fact that they are also starting 
points of actions? If we look back over a journey, in the 
play of our associations we may traverse it backward as 
well as forward, beginning from the end and returning to 
the starting point. But if we remember a poem in which 
every word has been connected with the next by our learn- 
ing process we cannot reverse those associations, we can- 
not begin with the last word and repeat the line toward 
the first. We can hardly say the alphabet backward. 
Evidently we cannot do so because every word involves 
the action of speaking. Thus the understanding of our 
associative mental action cannot be separated from the 
physical actions. As long as the bodily reactions and 
the processes of inhibition are disregarded, we cannot give 
a full account of the interplay of ideas. The discussion of 
associations singles out only one factor in the complex 
situation. We must now turn to the two others, the re- 
action process and the inhibition. 



CHAPTER IX 
REACTION 

The Motor Process. — From our biological point of view 
we had to consider the nervous system as a complicated re- 
flex arc which leads from the sense organs through the 
brain to the muscles. The present impressions work to- 
gether with the reproductions of the past in stimulating 
the motor part of the arc. The whole process receives its 
significance from this final reaction. The organism which 
is stimulated and which reverberates from all the earlier 
stimuli, we saw, would be lost in the struggle for exist- 
ence, if its movements did not secure the necessary adjust- 
ments. To run away from the danger, to approach the 
food is a typical achievement of the whole psychophysical 
apparatus. Yet it may seem as if such a movement were 
simply a bodily appendage, which may interest the physi- 
ologist but not the psychologist. The mental process con- 
sists in the impressions and associations. It appears as if 
the student of the mind should not ask what physical 
effects come after the conscious process. 

But this would be misleading. Every step forward will 
show us more clearly that the physical reaction which 
follows the central excitation is fundamental for th& 
psychical experience, too. 

First, the physical reaction is itself a source of sensory 
stimulation. The impressions and associations cause 
muscle contractions. But these muscle contractions them- 
selves ^re then causes of sense impressions. These sense 
effects of the actions are certainly mental states which con- 

122 



REACTION 123 

tribute much and perhaps an essential part to the conscious ' 
experience. Secondly, the actions have outer effects; they 
change the surroundings. These changes are perceived, and 
the ideas of these final effects become associated with the 
central states which led to the actions. And finally, the 
process in the brain cell itself must be influenced by the 
motor discharge in the center. The central process must 
be a different one, according to whether the path of motor 
response is wide open or is blocked. The centrifugal 
process must accordingly have a backward influence on 
the central process itself and may be responsible for the 
character of this central excitement. If this is so, the 
roles seem changed. The centrifugal function appears to 
be almost more important than the centripetal one which 
brings the stimulus. It is the action of the organism 
which controls the mental life. "We must now follow the 
reactions through these various stages. 

Every human movement starts from the action of a 
special motor center. In the lowest animal forms the one 
cell which forms the body receives the impression and 
generates the reaction movement, but in every higher form 
of animal life the functions are separated. The sensory 
function ends in a center of its own, and the motor func- 
tion begins in its own center, and between the two stands 
regularly a third element, an intercommunicating nerve 
apparatus which is influenced by the sensory cells and 
transmits the excitement to the motor cells. 

Both the sensory centers and the motor centers can be found 
in every segment of the central nervous system. In the spinal 
cord the rear columns of gray matter contain the sensory cen- 
ters, the front columns of gray matter the motor centers, the 
surrounding white substance contains connecting nerve fibers. 
In a corresponding way in the highest segment of the central 
organ, in the hemispheres, the gray surface layer, the cortex, 
consists of large sensory and motor regions. In the former the 
optical and acoustical and tactual nerve paths end. In the latter 



124 PSYCHOLOGY 

the impulses for tlae movement of the face and the arms and 
the legs originate, and from these they are carried down to the 
lower motor centers. The inner, white parts of the hemispheres 
consist of fibers which lead the sensorial stimulus upward or 
which carry the motor impulse downward, or which interconnect 
various centers. Large areas of the cortex, however, themselves 
are interconnected. On every level each of these intermediating 
structures is linked with many sensory and with many motor 
cells. The result is that sensory excitements can be summed 
up, that motor impulses can be produced where one sensory 
stimulus would be insufficient, and that many motor centers can 
be brought into cooperation. 

This distribution of the impulse in the intermediating appar- 
atus does not involve a weakening, as the energy with which the 
motor centers work is not received from the sensory center. It 
is stored up energy which is simply released. The streiigth of 
the explosion may thus be quite disproportionate to the energy 
of the stimulus. The end instruments of the connecting cell may 
clasp those of the sensory and of the motor centers, but they 
do not grow into one another. A certain resistance remains 
which the excitement has to overcome when it passes from the 
centripetal to the central and from the central to the centrifugal 
apparatus. The complexity of this transition from the sense 
organ through the mediating neuron with its branches to the 
motor centers makes the act strikingly different from a mere 
conduction of an excitement in one given nerve path. The 
motor impulse may come much later than the sensory excite- 
ment; it may last longer; it may be in a different rhythm; it 
may be stronger or weaker ; it may show effects of central fatigue 
or of changes in the blood circulation. 

In its simplest as well as in its most complex form the re- 
action process of the nervous system serves the interests of the 
individual. We recognized in our general discussion that the 
usefulness of the functions offers no difficulty to the biological 
explanation; on the contrary just this serviceableness of the 
apparatus allows it to be explained by the same principles by 
which in the doctrine of evolution the development of all other 
useful organs is understood. The direct observation indicates 
too that the inborn anatomical apparatus is ready for useful 



KEACTION 125 

work before it can be controlled by any intelligent deliberation. 
The child begins life with the useful sucking movements and 
swallowing movements, reacting on the tactual sensations of the 
lips and tongue, and at every further step of the individual 
development he is dependent upon such preestablished connec- 
tions. He learns speaking because the motor apparatus which 
controls the vocal cords is interconnected with the sensory centers 
which receive the sound sensation. We can observe the same 
type of useful reaction where no mental accompaniment is in 
question. We have only to think once more of the decapitated 
frog. We saw that the spinal cord a few hours after death can 
still sum up successive stimuli. But we may now consider the 
exactitude with which the motor explosions of this lifeless spinal 
cord are adjusted to the outer conditions. If we apply some 
drops of acid to the left side of the dead frog's body, the left 
hind leg is immediately contracted and the toes rub off the in- 
jurious acid. If the left leg is held immovable and the irritation 
continues, slowly the right leg will be brought into action and by 
violent contractions it reaches the place on the other side. 



The fundamental character of aU these preestablished 
reactions of the nerve arc is tvi^ofold. They either v^ork 
toward a continuation of a helpful influence or tovi^ard the 
protection from an injurious influence. The source of the 
influence may be at a distance, like the objects which 
stimulate the eye, the ear or the nose, or it may be in 
direct contact with the skin or it may be inside the body. 
The reaction which makes the helpful stimulus continue 
and increase may be one of approach or of yielding; the 
opposite may be one of escape or of attack. This funda- 
mental character of the reactions may take ever new forms, 
adapted to more complex needs of the organism, but even 
such a complex vehicle of progress as the process of imita- 
tion is a reaction by which the desirable impression is 
made to continue, and the same is true of the external 
actions which enter into the process of attention. The 
complication grows when an associative reproduction 



126 PSYCHOLOGY 

takes the place of a direct sense excitement and the re- 
actions respond to those memory products instead of to 
the perceptions. The stimulus becomes still more dif- 
ferentiated when the words as symbolic presentations of 
sense experiences replace the perceptions and memories. 

But there is still much greater complication on the 
motor side. The simplest development is the mere expan- 
sion over larger and larger groups of cooperating motor 
systems. The irritation which the instrument of the dentist 
excites in the nerve of the hollow tooth may produce at 
first contractions of the muscles of the face, and then the 
nerve excitement may irradiate in the spinal cord to the 
motor centers which make the arms and fingers and 
finally the legs contract. More important, however, is the 
organization of the reactions in complex units. From 
grasping and walking to speaking and reading, writing 
and piano playing, there is a continuous growth in the 
organization of movements. 

A fundamental condition for the perfection of life work 
is the process of habit. The more often a motor reaction 
has been performed, the more easily the sensory stimulus 
or its reproduction will lead to the appropriate response. 
With every repetition the resistance is decreased. The 
excitement for which many paths of discharge may exist 
flows most readily into the one which has been opened 
widely by such repeated performance. But this frequent 
reaction has still another effect which secures increasing 
efficiency of the central nervous system. The whole process 
forms short cuts. The way from the sense organ to the 
muscle becomes reduced by the linking of sensory and 
motor way stations. Through these the higher central 
organs are steadily disburdened and are able to perform 
new tasks. Reflexes in lower centers are steadily absorbed 
into highly organized reaction groups and the high re- 
actions are through these short cuts steadily transformed 
into reflexes in lower centers. As soon as they have be- 



EEACTION 127 

come such mechanized reactions, going on without any 
accompaniment of consciousness, they may enter again 
into other complex actions; and this means an uninter- 
rupted process of building up highly organized reaction 
systems. The writing movement is learned by developing 
slowly the ability to react on the models by the appropriate 
finger movements, but only when these have become autom- 
atized and have taken reflex form can they be made 
serviceable to the more highly organized reaction of writ- 
ing a letter. 

The centrifugal effect of the central excitement is, however, 
not confined to movements. The activity of glands, the dilation 
or contraction of blood-vessels and many other internal bodily 
functions are no less useful parts of the reactions. Again, 
we must not think only of the strong effects which are readily 
noticeable, the shedding of tears or the blushing. Numberless 
such responses of the organism occur which only subtle instru- 
ments can bring to our notice at all. Electrodes in our hands 
may make it visible on the galvanometer whether the resistance 
in the palm of our hands changes through the activity of our 
sweat glands. The experiment demonstrates that these glands do 
indeed become active, when sounds reach our ear or pictures our 
eye. These organic activities may again, like the muscle reac- 
tions, result from the reproduced excitements as well as from 
the direct stimulations, and thus may be connected with any 
associations. It is possible to measure the amount of gastric 
juice which the glands produce, for instance in a dog, in response 
to the seeing or smelling of meat, evidently a reaction of highest 
value for the digestive process. If the dog often sees the meat 
together with a particular color, until an association is estab- 
lished between the meat and the color, the color stimulus alone, 
as the experiment shows, is finally sufficient to produce the 
gastric activity which prepares for the digestion of the meat. 

The Sensory Effects of the Motor Processes. — The re- 
actions in the muscles or in the other centrifugal organs 
have interested us so far only as effects of central ex- 



128 PSYCHOLOGY 

citement. We reach their true significance for psychology 
as soon as we consider these reactions themiselves as sources 
of sensorial stimulation. Our finger touches something 
painfully hot. The immediate useful reaction is that we 
withdraw our arm. This movement of withdrawing cannot 
remain unnoticed. It involves pressure in the joints, ten- 
sion in the tendons, sensory excitement in the muscles ; and 
this whole kinesthetic complex enters consciousness. The 
centrifugal process from the central organ to the muscles 
is thus followed by a centripetal response, and these kines- 
thetic impressions must combine with the pain which 
started the whole process. The conscious experience be- 
comes enriched by this; the mind receives the pain sensa- 
tion plus the muscle sensation, and they become intimately 
associated with one another, as the injurious stimulus pro- 
duces regularly that movement of withdrawal. Mental ex- 
periences of this type are not exceptional and not depend- 
ent upon rare occurrences, but must arise in every instant 
of our life. Eeactions go on in our body incessantly. 
Every eye movement with which we glance over the out- 
lines of an object, every word which we speak, every 
finger movement and every step, is such a reaction, and 
everyone may be reflected by kinesthetic elements in con- 
sciousness. 

When a new stimulus breaks into our psychophysical 
equilibrium, it forces on the organism first of all the kind 
of reaction by which the sense organs become adjusted and 
the whole body is set for the fullest possible perception of 
the intruder. This reaction is biologically most useful, as 
it must result in a more distinct perception, which alone 
can be the starting point for further action. But all these 
processes of response, these adjustments in the sense organ, 
these new settings in the body by which the head is fixed 
in the most favorable position for perception, and the 
muscles brought into tension, must bring to consciousness a 
rich complex of kinesthetic sensations by which the in- 



EEACTION 129 

dividual's own bodily personality is brought into the 
center of the mind. This is exactly what happens when a 
sound, a light, a touch, attracts our attention. Certainly 
the process of attention is far more than the mere aware- 
ness of these reactions of adjustment, but they are an 
essential feature. 

The processes of space and time perception, too, cannot 
be understood, if the sensations which result from the 
motor reactions are disregarded. If a light point comes 
nearer to us, the two eyes which are directed toward it 
must converge in order that it continue to stimulate the 
two fixation points. This reaction proceeds automatically, 
but its sensorial effects pass into consciousness. "We feel 
the increasing convergence of our eyes and this element 
enters into our perception of the spatial approach of the 
light. If our finger follows along the edges of a table, our 
tactual finger sensation may remain unchanged. But the 
movement of the arm is felt, and the kinesthetic sensation 
fuses with the touch impression and gives us a perception 
of the table's length. We move our head toward the 
source of sound in an immediate reaction on the different 
intensity in the two ears. Again it is the awareness of this 
reaction which gives to the sound its local shade. Of 
course, only the child has to go through the actual move- 
ments. In the developed mind the associated reproductions 
mostly replace the original sensations, and finally short 
cuts are formed by which even those reproduced sensations 
are skipped in consciousness. But our real space per- 
ception could never have gained its character without these 
impressions from real reaction movements. 

In the time perception the tensions and relaxations in 
the muscle system are the chief sources of mental supply 
for immediate time measurement. In the case of emotions, 
this mental resounding of the actual centrifugal responses 
reaches its height. Those reactions which enter into the 
simple feelings, the movements of approach and escape 



130 PSYCHOLOGY 

and of attacking occur here in all their shadings, but 
superadded to them are the sensorial effects of the dilation 
and contraction of blood-vessels, of the activities of glands, 
of contractions and relaxations in the face region, of 
changes in respirations and of heart activity. The aware- 
ness of these automatic reaction processes is not the whole 
of the emotion, but we do not know any emotion toward 
which this consciousness of the bodily changes does not 
contribute significant elements. 

The mental effect of the reaction is, however, not con- 
fined to purely bodily sensations. Our muscles react in 
order to change the world. When our fingers move, they 
leave the written words on the paper, they produce the 
sounds on the piano. These changes in the outer world 
reach the senses of the actor. The original percep- 
tion or idea which leads to the reaction is thus always fol- 
lowed not only by a perception of the actual movement, but 
also by the awareness of the outer effect, which too becomes 
associated with the starting point of the reaction. Our 
acting is the chief vehicle to carry material to our mind 
and to form there associative connections without end. 

"We may take one further step. The mental situation 
which leads automatically to an action becomes associated, 
we saw, with the sensory effect of the action. This simple 
associative process must then secure a further result: the 
idea of the effect must itself start the movement. Now a 
true circle is closed. The consciousness of the effect to be 
reached becomes the decisive forerunner of the motion, and 
through this new development the automatic action is 
raised to a will action. When we discuss the will, we shall 
indeed find that this anticipation of the idea of the end 
is the most significant feature of every will activity. 



CHAPTER X 
INHIBITION 

The Suppression of Mental Contents. — We cannot 
understand the actual experiences of the mind, if we think 
only of its positive functions and forget the negative side. 
Stimulation, association and reaction are all on the credit 
side of the mind. We must look into the debit account too. 
A world of stimulation surrounds man and hammers on 
his senses. If all were admitted, a chaos of impressions 
would rush into our mind. But the mind would be still 
more overwhelmed by the tremendous onrush, if the asso- 
ciations had perfect freedom and were received in un- 
limited quantity. And finally if all the reactions could 
set in for which the mental starting points are given, the 
mind would be in a tumultuous activity. We know that 
our real life is quite different. The span of our conscious- 
ness is narrow. We take in only a few impressions at a 
time; we develop the associations only in some definite 
lines; and our reactions are orderly and well organized. 
Some selecting principle must be at work which denies en- 
trance to the unfitting stimulations and which suppresses 
the undesirable associations and which cuts off large parts 
of the reactions. The usual technical term is inhibition. 

How does it really stand with our impressions? Do we 
really hear and see and touch everything which comes into 
the sphere of our senses? We are reading an inter estiug 
story and are so absorbed that we do not hear the knock- 
ing at our door. Of course, the sound waves reach our ear, 
but the message which the acoustical nerve carries to the 

131 



132 PSYCHOLOGY 

center in the cortex evidently finds unfavorable conditions 
there. The sound is not really heard. Let the visitor at 
our door become more impatient and knock more sharply, 
suddenly the sound breaks into consciousness. But at the 
same time we lose hold of our visual impressions ; we stop 
reading. When the prestidigitator on the stage is anxious 
to keep us from seeing what he is doing with his left hand, 
he simply performs some interesting trick with the right 
hand. The impressions from his right hand push them- 
selves into the center of our consciousness, and although 
his left hand is in our visual field and actually stimulates 
our retina and through the optical nerve our visual centers 
in the brain, yet it is ineffective. 

Under certain conditions this mental insensitiveness may 
be heightened. The extreme case may be found in certain 
states of hysteria, where the patient may be unable to per- 
ceive tactual impressions when pins are thrust into the 
skin, or in the artificial states of hypnotism, where in ac- 
cordance with the suggestion which he receives the hyp- 
notized subject may not see a person who stands near to 
him and may not hear what is said to him. In normal life, 
moreover, it is not necessarily one impression which crowds 
out another. It may be an inner excitement, an absorbing 
thought, an emotional irritation. We may go home from 
our work absorbed by an earnest thought and may reach 
our house without having really noticed anything on the 
street around us. The visual images of the passersby, the 
noises of the street, were in this case perhaps not com- 
pletely inhibited, but they had lost their ordinary impres- 
siveness, they had faded to a state of decreased vividness. 
We saw enough of the street to find our way, and yet not 
enough to remember any of the shop windows over which 
our eye glanced. 

When I am hard at work at my desk, I do not hear the 
hurdy-gurdy on the street. Yet I can easily discover that 
it had reached my ear all the time, for I feel a relief the 



INHIBITION 133 

moment the so-called music stops. The inhibition does 
not necessarily make the one impression victorious while 
the other is defeated. There may be a mutual inhibition 
by which the impressiveness of both is decreased. We can 
read a book and listen at the same time to a conversation, 
but neither comes to its full mental effectiveness. There 
will be either a certain fluctuation, by which sometimes 
the one, sometimes the other alone is vivid in our mind, or 
both will suffer and lose elements of their complex 
appearance. 

A very interesting case of mutual inhibition is the 
phenomenon of fusion. We called it fusion whenever two 
impressions stimulating the mind at the same time melt 
into each other so that each loses somewhat its independent 
existence. Even in the elementary sensations we can find 
this in every field. The taste and smell sensations fuse 
with each other. Our muscle and joint and tendon and 
skin sensations, which we experience during the movement 
of a limb, may blend into a unity in which no one is com- 
pletely that which it would be by itself alone. The color 
sensation and the gray sensation fuse. A touch, a tempera- 
ture and a feeling sensation may blend into such a unit. 

The classical case is that of the tone sensations. If two 
tones which stand in the relation of an octave are given to- 
gether the unmusical person is hardly able to recognize the 
two sounds as two. They fuse so completely that each one 
is lost in the combined sound. This is true to a slightly 
smaller degree for the fifth or the third, and still less for 
the fourth. What happens in all these cases? Evidently 
the sensations which fuse are similar to one another. If 
they were not, they would simply interfere with one an- 
other, and one would inhibit its rival in consciousness. 
Just since they are similar, they can remain together. Yet 
they cannot remain in their original complete form. Each 
one loses certain parts. The one tone extinguishes some- 
thing in the other and each is bound to the other by this 



134 PSYCHOLOGY 

incompleteness. But this is then ultimately a partial in- 
hibition. 

The case is the more interesting, as it opens a vista of theo- 
retical problems, which the psychologists have hardly approached 
yet. It suggests that the mental states which we call elements 
are after all complexes of simpler parts in consciousness. If 
the sensations of tone or color or taste or touch were truly the 
ultimate atoms of the mind, they could not lose any parts. But 
they could not show similarity either, as the similarity means 
a certain community of elements. Both the community of parts 
in similarity and the mutual inhibition of parts in fusion demand 
speculations about the ultimate structure of the sensations. For 
practical description in psychology we have good reasons to 
treat these sensations as elements, because they are the simplest 
parts which we can recognize in our experience, but, theoretically, 
we cannot deny that these elements may consist of much simpler 
psychical atoms. They cannot be found in our experience, be- 
cause they are never isolated. We know them only in their 
complex aggregate. 

The complete or partial inhibition of sense impressions 
finds its counterpart in the suppression of associations. 
A word like "house" may arouse numberless associations. 
We inquired into the principles which push some particu- 
lar ones into the foreground. The image of the house 
which we saw last or which we have seen frequently or 
which impressed us by its beauty or by its affective home 
value, may be favored before all others. We attached 
special importance to the further principle of selection, the 
constellation of ideas. If we do not hear the word house 
only, but hear white house, and heard Washington in 
the sentence just before, the image of the one presidential 
residence is pushed into our mind by the constellation. Yet 
all these positive conditions which favor the associative 
selection could not secure the real effect, if they were not 
enhanced by the negative suppression of all the other pos- 



INHIBITION 135 

sible associations. The word ''white" in ''white house" 
may arouse in our mind the picture of snow or of lilies, 
and the word "house" may suggest the picture of our 
neighbor's cottage. But in the combination the "white" 
inhibited the picture of that brown house of our neigh- 
bor, and the "house" suppressed the memory of the 
lilies, and as "Washington" was still reverberating in our 
mind, no other white house came to consciousness, because 
every other specimen would have been inhibited by the 
idea of the capital. The negative influence is certainly not 
less important than the positive. The selection of the fitting 
offers no difficulty, if the mechanism wards off every un- 
fitting association. 

The Central Problem of Inhibition. — What is the for- 
mula which controls this suppression ? We sometimes hear 
the superficial statement that there is room in our mind for 
one experience only. But what is one experience? We 
surely know that the mind has plenty of room for masses 
of impressions and they may be joined with an abundance 
of feelings and emotions, thoughts and memories. If we 
listen to an opera, we see the stage setting and the actors, 
we hear the words and associate them with the meaning, 
we hear the tones and the intervals in the singing, we have 
the memory of the first act, while we listen to the second, 
we anticipate the development of the coming scenes, and 
with this host of impressions we still combine the tones of 
the whole orchestra, discriminating the violins and the 
cellos, the flutes and the trumpets. No one of all these ex- 
periences hinders another ; the orchestra does not suppress 
the stage setting, and the plot does not inhibit the orches- 
tral music. On the contrary, they help one another ; and if 
a new chorus comes to the stage, there is still ample room 
in our mind to see the costumes and to hear the song. But 
if some one near us begins to talk to his neighbor, we say 
that disturbs us. Their whispering is either suppressed in 
our mind, because we are absorbed by the music, or those 



136 PSYCHOLOGY 

words beside us break into our mind and the whole per- 
formance, stage and music, are partially inhibited. Why 
are the orchestral music and the plot and even the 
thoughts of our internal criticism altogether only one 
experience, while the few words of our neighbors stand 
opposed to it as a second experience? "Why are they in- 
hibited by. the music, while the words on the stage are 
reenf orced by it ? 

The contents may be of most unlike character and yet 
remain peacefully together. At a gay dinner party we 
may enjoy the symphonies of taste and smell and touch 
and at the same time the witty remarks of our hostess. 
They all form the one experience, but if a tooth should 
begin to ache, or the thought of an engagement which we 
have forgotten should enter our mind, the new experience 
would stand out as independent and would subdue and 
try to inhibit the perception of the feast. A scholar in the 
midst of his research may embrace in one thought experi- 
ence the memories of many a book and the consequences of 
complicated theories, but while all the thoughts are help- 
ing one another, there is not the least room left in his mind 
for the thought of his umbrella. It is not a question of the 
number of elements, nor is it a question of strength. In a 
hall full of noisy people a whispered word may find the 
way to our mind and may inhibit the much stronger sounds 
around us. A mother may sleep soundly through a 
thunderstorm, and yet the faintest sound from her child 
stirs up the psychophysical mechanism and awakes her. 

A mere reference to the physiological conditions cannot help 
here either. It has sometimes been thought that one brain excite- 
ment inhibits another, because we may conceive the nerve proc- 
esses as waves which may interfere with one another. But even 
if it were not so arbitrary to fancy the action in a nerve excite- 
ment as being wave movements, it would not lead us further, for 
our real interest is to understand why this particular excitement 



INHIBITION 137 

suppresses one group of impressions and not another group. 
It is therefore no better if the psychical fact of the narrow 
span of conciousness is translated into the psychophysical theory 
that the brain has only a limited amount of energy*. The same 
idea has also been expressed in the theory that there is a special 
inhibition center in the frontal regions of the brain hemispheres, 
which has the power to suppress sensorial excitements which 
conflict with the chief action at a given time. Why it conflicts 
is just what we want to know. 

Physiological theories have supplied us also with detailed hypo- 
thetic schemes for the suppression of brain functions. It is said 
that brain cells are surrounded by capillary blood-vessels and 
that the cell function stops when those blood-vessels are con- 
tracted. The inhibition would be a kind of anemia of the cells. 
Or again it can be imagined that the fine branches in which 
the nerve fibers end are contracted. As soon as they withdraw 
the contact with the next neuron is interrupted. Inhibition of 
a cell function would mean then that its supply of nerve ex- 
citement is cut off because the bridges to other cells are broken. 
But, whatever the particular theory concerning the suppressed 
cell action may be, we still stand before the old problem why 
just this and not another cell, just this and not another center is 
cut off from blood supply or from nerve stimulation. 

Moreover the real contrast does not consist in one group 
of impressions or ideas being inhibited, while the other 
simply goes on. The undisturbed group is at the same 
time somehow reenforced and emphasized. It becomes more 
impressive, more vivid, more distinct. AVhile the inhibited 
content fades away, the remaining part gets a firmer hold 
of the mind, it forces itself on consciousness, it is the ex- 
treme contrast to the suppression of the inhibited material. 
We have recognized before that this greater impressiveness 
is in no way an increase of intensity. It can come to the 
slightest and weakest impression. The pianissimo of the 
violin may hold the audience spellbound and inhibit in 
everyone's mind all the routine thoughts of the day. If we 
are to characterize the changes by a single term, the best 



138 PSYCHOLOGY 

is probably vividness. The mental content which inhibits 
everything around it becomes itself more vivid, while the 
other contents are shaded down through lower degrees of 
vividness until they completely disappear. To be inhibited 
means then to be at the zero point of vividness. The prob- 
lem in its totality is then : why do some mental states de- 
crease in vividness, while others increase? "We saw that 
the mere reference to the narrow span of consciousness or 
to the number of ideas or to the relative strength of the 
ideas or to the interferences or limitations in the brain 
currents does not solve the problem. 

The Inhibition of Actions. — We may perhaps come 
nearer to the solution, if we consider one other large group 
of inhibitory processes, of which we have not spoken so 
far. The world of action is controlled by inhibition, as 
Well as the realm of consciousness. The physiologist knows 
many types of processes by which bodily movements are 
suppressed. He knows, for instance, that if an electric 
current stimulates the vague nerve which goes from the 
brain to the heart, the movement of the heart muscle is in- 
hibited. But the psychologist is hardly interested in all 
the inhibitory mechanisms in the nervous system of the 
body. They probably belong to different groups, based on 
different principles. But there is one group which is of 
paramount interest for psychology, because it stands in 
very intimate relation to human will action. It is the 
mutual inhibition of antagonistic muscles, to which we re- 
ferred before. It is not a theory but a fact that the muscle 
systems of our body are arranged as opposites. The sim- 
plest case is that of the flexor muscles and the extensor 
muscles by which we bend and stretch our limbs. We 
cannot do both at the same time, however quickly we may 
rhythmically alternate between the two opposite move- 
ments. We cannot both close and open our hand, inhale 
and exhale, turn to the right and to the left, look upward 
and downward, approach and Avithdraw. 



INHIBITION 139 

But the interesting point is that this antagonism, of op- 
posite muscles is prepared in the central nervous system. 
The motor brain center from which the flexor muscles of 
the arm are excited has a kind of paralyzing influence on 
the nerve mechanism which produces the contraction of 
the extensor muscles, and vice versa. The physiologists 
have demonstrated this by their experiments on the highest 
apes. If the brain center for the stretching of the limb 
is electrically excited a relaxation of the opposite muscles 
sets in and prepares the way for the extension. Moreover if 
immediately afterward the center for the bending muscle 
is excited, it can be shown that its responsiveness is altered. 

Many detailed theories explain this interaction between 
two such rival centers. A favorite idea is that the two an- 
tagonistic motor cell groups are connected by a drwinage 
apparatus by which the stream of the nervous process is 
always drawn into the one of the two motor paths in 
which the stronger excitement is going on. If we bend our 
arm, because the motor impulse from the bending center 
is stronger than that from the stretching center, the drain- 
age mechanism draws even the energy of the stretching 
center into the channel of the bending muscle. The 
stretching would thus be inhibited, not only because the 
activity in the bending mechanism is the stronger one, but 
because the activity in the whole stretching mechanism is 
eliminated. The stretching center is paralyzed by the 
power of its rival. But, however we may picture these 
subtle mechanisms, the decisive fact stands out clearly: 
the central apparatus for action is naturally organized in 
mutually opposing cell groups of which the activity of 
the one always suppresses the activity of the other. 

The Action Theory. — This simple fundamental fact of 
the motor antagonism may throw light on all those ap- 
parently chaotic inhibitions in the sphere of sensations 
and ideas. We found there, too, that some groups of ex- 
periences became more vivid while others were suppressed, 



140 PSYCHOLOGY 

but we could not discover any principle which controlled 
the selection. This difficulty disappears, if we consider the 
actions to which those impressions or ideas lead. Wht rever 
one group of impressions increases in vividness and another 
decreases and fades away and is inhibited, there we find 
that the two would lead to interfering activities. This 
changes the situation entirely. In the world of ideas wt3 
could not understand why one idea excludes another, but 
in the world of actions we saw clearly that one action does 
and must exclude another, because their whole organiza- 
tion is antagonistic. 

Yet this alone would not be an explanation. The one 
idea leads us to approach, the other to withdraw; the ap- 
proach and the withdrawal interfere with each other. But 
the ideas evidently precede them. If the idea which de- 
mands the approach is the stronger one, we can easily un- 
derstand that the approach will really result and that the 
opposite action of withdrawing will be suppressed. But 
we do not understand why the idea is inhibited which 
would demand the withdrawing. Yet we need only to con- 
nect the various elements of the situation and to presuppose 
that the activity in the centrifugal paths has backward 
influence on the sensory centers. The sensory excitement 
which finds its motor center ready for action is accom- 
panied by a vivid sensation, and the sensory excitement 
which finds its motor center obstructed and indisposed to 
action is accompanied by a sensation of decreased vivid- 
ness. An impression or an associated idea is inhibited 
when it would lead to an action for which the motor center 
is unresponsive. The preparedness and iinpreparedness 
for action in the motor centers thus becomes the regulating 
condition for the reenforcement and suppression in the 
whole world of sensations and ideas. As long as we try to 
explain everything only by sense stimulation and associa- 
tion, there are no lights and shades in the picture. The 
most characteristic features of mental life, vividness and 



INHIBITION 141 

inhibition, remain neglected. The effort to keep house 
with a mere association theory must therefore be acknowl- 
edged as hopeless. An additional principle must be found 
by which the order and the shading of our mental life may 
be understood. Not a few psychologists, to be sure, sought 
a convenient refuge in the introduction of some spiritual 
principle in the mind, frequently called apperception. It 
was meant as a power which can intrude into the sphere of 
ideas and arbitrarily select the one and reject the other, 
push this forward and suppress that. It was exempt 
from the chain of causal connections; it broke into the 
realm of psychical nature like a miracle. Surely no one 
has a right to say that such a mind power which prefers 
and inhibits thoughts has no reality, but its reality lies 
in the world of purposive psychology. We shall find it 
there as a central energy, but in the sphere of causal psy- 
chology it is meaningless. The reenforcement and inhibi- 
tion must be treated here as processes of the psycho- 
physical mechanism. The theory which we have traced 
fully satisfies this demand. It overcomes the narrow incom- 
pleteness of the association theory and avoids the incon- 
sistency of the apperception theory. In contrast to both, 
let us call this the action theory. 

The action theory does not give up anything which the 
association theory proposes. The whole interplay of re- 
productions must indeed be explained by association. But 
in addition to the mere associative process, the motor proc- 
esses become of fundamental importance, too, for the 
actual psychical experience. Whether a color sensation is 
red or blue, and whether a noise is a roaring or a 
whistling, depends upon the sensory excitement only. But 
whether the color or the noise become vivid in the mind 
or are refused admittance, depends upon the conditions 
which prevail in the motor centers into which their sensory 
excitement leads. If the channels of discharge are wide 
open, that noise or color will be vivid ; if the channels of 



142 PSYCHOLOGY 

discharge are closed, they will be inhibited, like the noise 
on the street, which we do not hear when all our actions 
are directed toward the book which we are reading. 

It is evident that this formulation of the action theory ex- 
presses the principle in its most abstract form. It becomes 
adjusted to the richness of life only when we consider how ex- 
tremely complex the motor mechanism is, which, according to the 
theory, influences the reenforcement and inhibition of the sen- 
sory states. Every impulse to movement involves groups of 
other coordinated or subordinated motor impulses. In the same 
way the suppression of an antagonistic impulse must have its 
inhibitory influence on the coordinated and subordinated motor 
centers. But every one of these aroused motor cells has again 
its antagonist; every cooperating motor excitement therefore 
increases the vividness of certain sensory impressions or ideas, 
and every subdued motor cell group may cut off the chances 
of certain ideas and impressions. 

Moreover our brain is never in a state of complete rest. The 
stimulus from without does not break into an inactive system. 
We need only to think of the thousandfold impulses which at 
every moment go to our muscles and to the walls of our blood- 
vessels. When these impulses fail, as in fainting, we fall down. 
When a new stimulus or a new association stirs up a new motor 
impulse, it does not enter an unexcited region, but it merely 
produces a change in the extremely complicated system of motor 
activities. The equilibrium of the parts of the brain is the 
equilibrium of a system of moving masses, and it is just this 
which explains its great plasticity. But we must further con- 
sider that the efficiency of those millions of motor centers, and 
accordingly their influence on the sensory sphere, must depend not 
only upon the actual nervous excitement but also upon a number 
of other conditions. Fatigue and exhaustion, the nutrition of 
the centers, the blood circulation, and above all the molec- 
ular changes resulting from previous training must con- 
tribute their part toward continuous changes in the motor system, 
on which the sensoiy centers play. Hence it is not surprising 
that exactly the same sensory stimulus may produce at different 
times entirely different motor reactions and may produce im- 



INHIBITION 113 

pressions of entirely different degrees of vividness. The experi- 
ment of the ph^^siologists proves too that the electric stimula- 
tion of a iDarticular brain center can excite very different 
motor responses in the limbs of an animal according- to the 
position of the limb at the time. 

It is of course no argument against the action theory that 
numberless sensory states lead to action without becoming" vivid 
at all. We have seen before that the reaction which originally 
passed through the highest sensory centers is slowly transferred 
to short cut paths which connect lower sensory with lower motor 
way stations. This abbreviation of the process secures the move- 
ment result as a mere reflex without participation by the higher 
centers. The sensory impression is in this case not noticeable, 
because the stimulus does not proceed to the higher sensory cells 
at all, but whenever these sensory end stations are reached, their 
strongest motor effectiveness coincides with their strongest vivid- 



According to the popular view a world of impressions 
and ideas exists in us, entirely independent of our actions, 
and when they are complete and perfect, they send their 
message to some motor apparatus which carries out the 
order. Such a fancy must be entirely reversed. In every 
moment the motor situation decides the possibilities in the 
sensory sphere. Our ideas are the product of our readi- 
ness to act. The little lizard is not aware of thundering 
noises around him, but when the slightest rustling indi- 
cates danger, it perceives it at once and escapes. That 
slight noise met a disposition to reaction; the loud one is 
without significance for the system of the lizard's actions. 
We all perceive the world just as far as we are prepared to 
react to it. Oitt^ ahility to respond is the true vehicle of 
our power to know, and all training and habit formation in 
the sphere of our actions shape and stamp the perceptions 
and memories and thoughts in our mind. 

As soon as we have recognized the bearing of the cen- 
trifugal action on all the central processes, it seems only 



144 PSYCHOLOGY 

natural to consider whether this same principle may not 
be expanded beyond the sphere of vividness and inhibi- 
tion. We know that the experience of pleasure leads to 
one kind of movement, and that of pain to an opposite 
kind. We know that the stimulus coming from different 
points in space awakes different reaction movements, that 
a short or a long or a rhythmical impression awakes motor 
responses of very different type. May it not be that in all 
these cases, too, the character of the process in the motor 
centers has influence on the preceding sensorial excitement 
and gives a special shading to the mental impression which 
leads to those actions? The innervation of the approach 
movement and the innervation of the withdrawal movement 
may contribute to the feeling value of the impression, and 
the innervation of the right or left movement, of the quick 
or the continued movement, may reflect space value and 
time value on the sensation. The occurrences in a large 
railway station cannot be understood as long as only the 
incoming trains are studied and no attention is given to 
the outgoing trains which are dependent upon the clear- 
ing or blocking of the outward tracks and upon the direc- 
tion in which they are to start. Whatever goes on in our 
mental life is dependent upon the clearing and blocking 
and switching of the tracks for reaction. The whole 
setting of our centrifugal system influences the flux of our 
thoughts and feelings, and furnishes all the means , for 
really scientific explanation, while the popular theories re- 
fer to the mysteries of a subconscious mind. The influences 
which determine the progress of our mental life are not 
subconscious mental activities, but the settings of the 
centrifugal nervous mechanism. They decide what is to 
come to the foreground of consciousness. This answer to 
the central problem of mind, to be sure, is merely a 
psychophysical one, but we have recognized why we have 
no right to seek another answer in the realm of causal 
psychology. 



B. THE COIVIPLEX INDIVIDUAL PROCESSES 

CHAPTER XI 
PERCEPTION 

Unity of Perception. — If we turn from the elementary- 
processes to the complex products in consciousness, our 
interest is not to search for new processes other than those 
which we have traced, but to examine the way in which the 
chief forms of our actual experience are to be understood 
as combinations of the elementary actions. The part which 
lies behind us is the fundamental study of the mind in 
terms of causal psychology. But the discussion of these 
elementary states dealt with abstractions; they exist only 
in the midst of the complex combinations. We do not ex- 
perience isolated sensations or reactions, but ideas and 
emotions and volitions, and even these are bound together 
and are fused into a unified personality. We may single 
out one or another complex state as the object of our 
study, but we should falsify the situation if we were to 
deal with it as if it could really be cut off from the one 
interwoven tissue of inner life. We cannot possibly, there- 
fore, proceed from one group to another without referring 
to the rest. The whole mental life is one dynamic system. 

As our survey of the general processes began with the 
stimulation which excites the mind from without, our out- 
look over the special complex experiences may start with 
the perception in which the sense stimulations play the 
leading role. It makes no difference whether the periph- 
eral senses or the internal sense organs are the sources 

145 



146 PSYCHOLOGY 

of the impressions. We can perceive with closed eyes our 
arms and legs through the joint and muscle and tendon 
sensations as well as we perceive the moon and the stars 
through our light sensations. But in every case we really 
perceive a physical object and not only the isolated 
stimulus to which the single sensation responded. Even 
the simplest perception involves many sensations, and its 
physical counterpart consists of many stimuli. 

What binds a bundle of elementary experiences together 
and makes them one unified perception ? The answer must 
refer to our own attitude, since it evidently depends 
upon us how a perception is limited in space, in time, in 
number, in manifoldness. I perceive at present the room 
in which I am writing, but in the room I perceive also the 
book shelves, and on the book shelves a single book, and on 
the book I may perceive the golden print on its back, and 
out of this a single letter may be my perception. We can 
only say that any group of sense impressions is held to- 
gether as a perception, if it is connected with one re- 
sponsive attitude of aurs. I make use of the room as a 
whole, but also of the book, and in reading the title, the 
inscription on the back is the complete object toward which 
I take my attitude. 

The same perceived object may speak through different 
senses. I may see and touch and smell one flower. The thing 
may also appeal to external and internal senses. I may see 
my hand and feel its muscular strain. But these sensa- 
tions from external stimuli do not compose our total con- 
sciousness of the thing. Plenty of associative material 
may blend with that which reaches us at present through 
the sense organs. The man who sits at my side is per- 
ceived by me not only as that visual surface which he 
turns to me. I perceive him really as a substantial body. 
I do not see his back, and yet that back enters into the 
total perception upon which I react. If I by association 
add the legs of the man to my perception, in spite of the 



PEKCEPTION 147 

fact that the table between us obscures them, I am still 
within the limits of the perception, since I cannot take 
any attitude toward his upper half without being con- 
trolled also by a vague reference to the existence of his 
complete body. But if the association brings to me an 
incident of the man's previous life, that story of his boy- 
hood may associate itself with my perception, but it re- 
mains an independent experience. Even if my anatomic 
knowledge associates the idea of his heart and lungs, I 
should transcend the simple perception, since I can react 
toward the man without any reference to the contents of 
his chest. A true perception involves only as much asso- 
ciated material as is needed in order to make a unified re- 
action possible. This does not prevent me, if I am a doctor, 
from taking his eye or his nose as an independent object 
of perception, or if I am a barber from treating his beard 
as such. 

The Elements of Space Perception. — If we turn to the 
study of perceptions, our problem is, of course, not to dis- 
cuss once more the elements which enter into them, but the 
character of the processes which result from the combina- 
tion as such. The psychologically most important one is 
the space relation. Yet at the very outset, we may meet 
an objection. Are we justified in considering the space 
character in our visual or tactual or acoustical perceptions 
as a complex experience? Ought we not to acknowledge 
that a certain space value is inherent in the simplest ele- 
ment? There must be something extensive in the ele- 
mentary visual sensation, if we are to build up from visual 
sensations the expanded universe. Every touch sensation 
has its immediate space value, and even for the tones and 
the noises it has often been claimed that it is their original 
nature to be more or less voluminous. Then we should 
have to recognize spatial largeness and smallness, spread- 
outness and pointedness, as simple qualities, like sweet and 
sour or blue and red. In that case we ought to have dis- 



148 PSYCHOLOGY 

cussed the space problem in connection with the other 
simple sensations. 

Again others may say that the mere expansion may well 
be understood as the summation of elementary sensations, 
of which each one in itself is not expanded. Thus the con- 
sciousness of dimension, of largeness and smallness may 
indeed arise from the combination only and may be a super- 
added impression which is not contained in the contribut- 
ing elements. But, they would say, each element has 
nevertheless a certain space value, namely that of location. 
The tactual surface may be a fusion of not expanded touch 
points, but each tactual point has a particular mental 
value which indicates where it belongs. Each light point 
which enters into the light area must be felt immediately 
as coming from a certain direction, and even every noise 
has this reference to right or left in its immediate content. 

Such statements are certainly based on correct self- 
observation. "Whether we can accept them as results of a 
final analysis cannot be decided, however, by such un- 
aided introspection. We recognize the shortcoming of 
such simple self-observation in the field of space percep- 
tion, as soon as we consider cases like the visual perception 
of depth. Nothing appears more certain to me in my im- 
mediate impression than the fact that here in my study 
the picture on the wall is further away from me than the 
chair at the side of my desk, and this still further than 
the book in my hand. The whole room appears to me with 
a characteristic depth value in which every single point 
has its distance from my head and nothing suggests that 
this might be resolved into simpler elements. But in such 
a case the experimental methods can help us to discover 
that this consciousness of depth is indeed the product of a 
very complicated cooperation of many factors. 

It is influenced partly by knowledge. I know the size of 
the picture and the chair and the book. If I do not 
know the magnitude of my objects, I may, as Poe tells in 



PEKCEPTION 149 

his story, take the little spider at my window for a gigan- 
tic monster in the far distance. The perspective and the 
distribution of lights and shadows help us, too, but the 
essential condition is a more complicated one. If I look 
into the room with my right eye, the furniture in the 
study must give me a different picture from that which I 
receive with the left eye. If I were to photograph the 
room from the position of my right eye and then from that 
of my left eye, all the details on the opposite wall would 
exactly coincide in the two pictures, but the nearer ob- 
jects, the chair and the book, would be projected on dif- 
ferent spots of the background. The angles would be dif- 
ferent for the right and the left camera. 

It is this difference of the two retinal images which pro- 
duces the effect of relative nearness and remoteness. 
Wherever our two retinal pictures are identical, as in the 
case of seeing a painting, everything appears at the same 
distance. But if they are different, as in the case of seeing 
a statue, each light point which falls on two not exactly 
corresponding points of the retinae awakes the feeling of 
being nearer to us or farther away from us than the 
others. "We can reconstruct that plastic effect most easily 
with a stereoscope. This instrument allows us to see 
through its two prismatic lenses two different photographs 
at the same time, the left eye seeing the left, the right eye 
the right picture. If the two photographs represent the 
same landscape from a left and from a right standpoint, 
the two flat pictures combine in our psychophysical system 
into one perfectly plastic model of the landscape. We see 
the tree in the foreground and the mountain in the 
distance with the same immediate perception of near- 
ness and remoteness which we receive from the real plastic 
world. 

The perception of the third dimension, which appears 
simple, can thus be demonstrated to be the product of a 
complex combination. Finally we may add one more 



150 PSYCHOLOGY 

factor in the situation. Even if I close one eye, I can be- 
come aware of it when the edge of the book comes 
nearer to me or is moved away from me. The one 
eye can only receive one picture, but here, as the experi- 
ment shows, the changing accommodation of the lens be- 
comes decisive. 11 the edge comes nearer, we can gain a 
sharp image only if the lens become more curved by the 
activity of the accommodation muscle. In really seeing 
the furniture of my room at different distances, I do 
not know anything of this change of accommodation or 
of the difference of the retinal images or of the influence of 
shadows. They all enter only as elements in the whole 
psychophysical effect. We may judge from such observa- 
tions that the space impressions which appear elementary 
may yet he results of complex processes. 

Space Perception and Muscle Action. — The case of the 
seeing of depth may, moreover, help us to recognize an- 
other feature of space perception which is extremely sig- 
nificant. We said that w^e are influenced by the changes 
in the accommodation of the lens. The curving of the 
lens itself, however, has no direct effect on the brain. If 
we become aware of the increased curvature of the lens 
for the near object, the functioning of the accommodation 
muscles in the eye must be responsible. But we saw that 
the chief condition for the feeling of distance is the dif- 
ference of the retinal images. Yet they also become really 
effective by action. If I look at my room, my left eye sees 
the furniture differently from my right eye. If I fixate 
the distant picture, each line in the carving of the chair 
near by falls on the two retina at two places which do not 
correspond. If I really keep my eyes steadily fixed on 
one point of the wall, I can distinctly notice each line 
of the chair as a double line. But as I am anxious to see 
everything in the room as it really exists, I must instinct- 
ively avoid such double images, and therefore change my 
fixation point. I look at the chair; that now appears 



PEECEPTION 151 

single. But if I am careful in my selfobservation, the 
edge of the distant picture now appears double, since we 
get single images only from what falls on corresponding 
points. 

Nevertheless I do not see these double images of chair or 
picture, if I simply look over the room in a natural way. 
I ignore them because they only work as starting points 
for a change in the fixation. Whatever awakes such a 
double image starts an immediate response by which we 
secure a new fixation, and our real attention always cen- 
ters on those objects which we see single. This fixation, 
however, evidently means nothing but a position of the 
eyeballs by which the fixated point throws its picture on 
the center of the two retinae. If we fixate at first the dis- 
tant wall and then the near chair, we must change the 
position of the eye by contracting certain eye muscles. 
Both the eyes must turn further inward for the nearer ob- 
jects to fall on corresponding points in the retinae. In 
other words the double image does not come to our con- 
scious experience as such, unless we especially try to ob- 
serve it, but it only serves as a stimulus for a change in 
the convergence of the eyeballs. The seeing of depth 
through the cooperation of the two eyes is thus a function 
of the muscle activity too. 

But we can go much further. There is no perception of 
space in which muscle activity is not originally involved. 
If we abstract from depth and think only of the visual sur- 
face, we know that the distance of two points from each 
other is measured by the movement with which the fixation 
point wanders to the left or to the right, upward or down- 
ward. If we fixate the one point, the other falls on the 
side part of the retina, and this stimulates the brain to re- 
spond by an eye movement through which the other point 
throws its picture into the retinal center of most distinct 
vision. Every single retinal area must be related to a 
definite muscular reaction in order to fulfill the chief pur- 



152 PSYCHOLOGY I 



pose, namely to bring each point into the region of distinct 
vision. 

It is easy to demonstrate the influence of this muscular 
action on the space perception by the so-called optical 
illusions. The stronger the movement effort with which the 
eye passes from one end point to another, the greater the 
apparent distance. If we see two lines of equal length of 
which the one has at its end points angles which are 
turned outward and the other angles which are turned in- 
ward, the first appears much longer than the other. The 
accessory lines which are turned outward give an addi- 
tional motor impulse, those turned inward inhibit the im- 
pulse of the movement toward the end point. A distance 
divided by five dots appears longer than an equally long 
undivided distance between two points. In the latter case 
the eye passes with one simple movement impulse from end 
to end ; in the former it has to make new efforts at the way 
stations. 

In a similar way we find an intimate correlation between 
tactual space perception and movement. We examine 
v^^ith our finger tip the form of a hole by moving the hand 
along its edges. Every detail of tactual outlines is repre- 
sented in our exploring movements. Here, too, the space 
illusions of touch show a most intimate relation between 
increase of movement impulse and overestimation of dis- 
tances. Even sounds and noises are no exception. The 
adult man is inclined to ignore the space relation of 
sounds, because spoken words and music are important for 
their quality and not for their locality. The child, and 
especially the animal, show much more the response to the 
space character of their impressions. We all turn our head 
to the source of a sudden noise. 

Theory of Space Perception. — If every perceivable dif- 
ference of local conditions in the outer world produces dif- 
ferences in the muscular response of the organism, it seems 
a natural idea to make this motor response contributory to 



PEECEPTION 153 

the explanation of space perception, A theory of this 
kind can take various forms. We have seen that the muscle 
contractions which we perform produce kinesthetic sensa- 
tions which have their source partly in the joints, partly 
in the muscles and tendons. If we turn our head to the 
right, we are aware of the actual movement through our 
kinesthetic sensations. The automobile horn which sounds 
from the right makes us turn the head to that side ; we 
feel the movement. May it not be that this movement 
sensation, which couples itself with the sound sensation, is 
just what gives to the sound its local character? Then the 
movement sensation is not felt as the indication of a move- 
ment, but as the local value of the sound sensation with 
which it is fusing. 

That a sound is heard on the right side means that the sound 
sensation is blending with that particular movement sensation 
which results from the turning of the head. Of course, the 
adult person need not actually go through that movement. We 
hear the tone coming from the right, even if we keep the head 
still. But we have gone through a long life history. As chil- 
dren we did react on the sound regularly with such a movement, 
when the sound attracted our attention at all. The movement re- 
sults from the difference of the intensity of sound in the two ears. 
The right ear gets a stronger sound than the left when the noise is 
on the right side of the body. We do not know anything about this 
difference; the sensations stimulated by the two ears are felt as 
one, and we cannot discriminate how much the one or the other 
ear contributes. But the inequality of the central excitement 
has an effect on the motor system. It breaks into the equilibrium 
of the motor impulses and pushes the head to the right, an 
important biological adjustment, as through this all our senses 
are directed toward the useful or dangerous source of the sound. 
As soon as this automatic reaction has resulted frequently, an 
association is established by which a memory picture of that 
movement sensation arises even Avhen no actual movement is 
performed. The motor impulse itself becomes inhibited, because 
we do not care to turn our head for every chance noise which 



154 PSYCHOLOGY 

we hear and we rely more and more on the associated repro- 
duction. 

We can readily understand how this same development took 
place in all the other senses. The distance of a visual point 
to the right or left, up or down, from the central point of the 
field of vision may also be felt by the movement sensation 
of the eye. The child is very slow in beginning to move the 
eyes toward the source of light and his spatial consciousness 
is at first probably very vague. But every visual experience is a 
new training in the performance of those eye movements which 
ibring the side parts of the object into the fixation point. Here 
too the movement sensation is not felt as an action of the eye, 
Ibut as the local value of the outlying light point. The motor 
impulses to the right and left normally balance each other, the 
•eye does not need to go. through the movements themselves, but 
the definite associations are again established. Every point of 
the retina excites psychophysical impressions which are asso- 
ciated with definite memory images of movement sensations, and 
these are experienced as the local values of the visual points. 
In the same way the feeling of tactual depth originates from the 
kinesthetic sensations of our moving limbs. Space perception, 
far from being an elementary process, appears, accordingly, as 
an act to which stimulation, reaction, association and inhibition 
contribute equally. 

This intimate relation of impression and movement also throws 
light on the discrimination of neighboring stimuli. We can 
perceive two tactual points as different, if we touch them with 
the tip of the tongue or the tip of the finger, when they are 
one to two millimeters distant from each other. On the back of 
the hand the distances must be about thirty millimeters, on the 
forearm forty, on the upper arm or the thigh sixty. In short 
the ability to discriminate local distances corresponds to the 
mobility of the organ. 

We must distinguish between fact and theory. The per- 
fect correlation between psychical space value and motor 
response is a fact. The idea that the space value exists 
in the fusing of the lights, sounds and pressures with 
the kinesthetic sensations is a theory, and this theory may 



PEECEPTION 155 

"be supplemented by other hypothetic views. In the light 
of all which we discussed, when we studied inhibition, it 
seems natural to suppose that the mere reference to move- 
ment sensations is not sufficient. AYe outlined there an 
action theory as against the mere association theory. The 
action theory claimed that the inner experience depended 
not only upon the incoming, but also upon the outgoing 
current; the central excitement is at every moment re- 
lated not only to the sense impression but also to the open- 
ness or closedness of the paths of motor discharge. We 
insisted that the openness corresponded to the vividness 
of the sensation, the closedness to its inhibition. We 
added at once that other characteristics of the sensory state 
may also be dependent upon the conditions of the motor 
system. Not only the conditions of the channels of motor 
discharge, but the direction of the channels into which the 
sensory excitement flows, must contribute to the character 
of the process at the central station. The actual movement 
sensation which results would then be only a secondary 
help by which we develop our space perception, the primary 
factor being the central process itself, with which the motor 
reaction starts. Each light and sound and touch has its 
mental local value, because the central excitement from the 
eye and ear and skin involves the innervation of an im- 
pulse to a special movement. The opposing theories in 
the debate on space perception are usually called the nativ- 
istic and the genetic ; the nativists claim that the space 
value is from birth an immediate trait of the impression, 
their opponents claim that space perception develops from 
the fusion of elements which themselves contain no refer- 
ence to space. If we rely entirely on the movement sensa- 
tions, we uphold the extreme genetic theory. If we consider 
the local value dependent upon the central connections of 
the motor impulse, we approach the standpoint of the 
nativists. We claim with them that every local impression., 
has a certain local sign from the beginning. Yet we avoid' ' 



156 PSYCHOLOGY 

their extreme position. The nativistic theory in the usual 
form lacks all connection with the fundamental fact that 
every space impression is bound together with a definite 
motion. The nativistic hypothesis in the form of 
the action theory acknowledges that the impression has 
local character from the start, before actual movements 
have been carried out, but at the same time that 
every local difference depends upon the relation to motor ; 
responses. 

We should say then that the primary experience of the j 
child is a certain direction value in every sense impression. \ 
The light, the sound, the touch and the pain appear to come » 
now from this, now from that direction, and this results 
from the fact that every point by inborn disposition for 
valuable reactions innervates a particular response. This 
direciion value and not the volitminousness is the true 
starting point of the child's experience. The space value 
of the extension results, like that of depth and of special 
forms, from the development in the individual experience. 
Only this development leads also to the fusion of the 
optical, tactual and acoustical space values with one an- 
other; we have only one space, because we have only one \ 
system of actions. , — 4- 

Perception of Time. — The perception of time leadS^Hs" / 
to problems, conflicts and solutions similar to those of I 
space. Yet its study is much simpler. We must be care- 
ful, however, to keep it free from the intrusion of neigh- 
boring problems. We are inquiring into the perception of 
time, not into the time of the perceptions, that is, we want 
to analyze the mental states by which we become aware of 
the objective time relations. But we do not ask at present 
about the time relations of our mental states. An idea 
may flash through our consciousness or may be present in 
it for days, but that is independent of the time which is 
embraced in the idea. The event which lasted a fraction 
of a second may linger in our mind for hours, and we may 



PEECEPTION 157 

think for a few seconds of happy years. The time dura- 
tion of a mental state must be separated from the percep- 
tion of time, just as sharply as the perception of space is 
always distinguished from the space in the brain in which 
the perceptions go on. 

But furthermore the perception of time must be dis- 
tinguished from the knowledge of that time which lies out- 
side of our compass of immediate awareness. We remember 
our childhood, but we do not perceive it, and even yes- 
terday's time durations are to-day no longer objects of 
perception. As soon as perception has furnished us a 
direct impression of present time, we can build up from 
that material the framework of the one idea of time with 
which we connect our memories, and finally the reports 
of history with their thousands of years or of astronomy 
with their billions of years. But the foundation remains 
the actual perception of the time distances which can be 
embraced by the span of our consciousness. The beginning 
of the time interval must still linger in our mind when it 
comes to an end, if the whole period is to be an object of 
perception. 

As soon as the situation is reduced to this immediate 
awareness of time relations, the one-dimensional character 
of time offers indeed a much simpler problem than that of 
the three-dimensional space. The exactitude of our time 
perception can be measured by experiment. We may com- 
pare the interval between a first and a second click with 
that between the second and a third. No one has" any 
difficulty in discriminating the two intervals if the first is 
ten seconds and the other seven or thirteen seconds. If 
it is nine or eleven seconds, mistakes will frequently arise. 
Such a simple experiment leads at once to the observation 
of the means by which we become aware of the time. Self- 
observation shows us that while the interval between the 
two clicks is apparently empty, inasmuch as there are no 
outer impressions, it is not at all empty in our conscious- 



158 PSYCHOLOGY 

ness. A large variety of sensations arises, and their chief 
sources are our bodily reactions. 

The first click produces a tension. As soon as the click 
has been heard, a relaxation follows, then we begin to wait 
expectantly for the second click. This expectation pro- 
duces a new wave of tension. If the second sound does not 
break in before this new tension has reached its height, a 
new ebbing and swelling of our bodily tensions follows, 
and usually the act of breathing gives the cue to it. The 
inspiration becomes part of the tension; the expiration 
part of the relaxation. If finally after ten seconds, the 
second click is heard, this total image of the fading first 
sound with the afterimages of the tensions and relaxations 
and the final sound sensation blend into one complex per- 
ception of the time interval. We repeat this inner process 
in passing through the second interval. If the sound 
breaks in before the whole process has been passed 
through, we feel the interval as shorter; if an additional 
phase of the tension wave is needed, we feel it as longer. 

This increase and decrease of tension plays a role in time 
perception similar to that of the movements in space 
perception. Which special organs are at work depends 
much upon individual habits. Not a few perform rhythmi- 
cal movements to divide such an interval instead of rely- 
ing upon the respiration. Ordinarily no one becomes con- 
scious of these tensions as such, but they fuse with the 
impressions so fully that they become simply the indica- 
tions of temporal values for the tactual or the acoustical 
or the optical stimulations. Anything which reduces these 
tensions must accordingly shorten the time interval. If 
we compare two time intervals of half a minute each, and 
the one of them is empty, while the other is filled with 
mental arithmetic or with the watching of an interesting 
scene, the latter appears much shorter. There was so much 
going on, and yet this manifold content did not make the 
time expand: on the contrary, it contracted it, because it 



PEECEPTION 159 

inhibited those tensions and relaxations which make us 
aware of the time. An afternoon full of errands and work 
passes quickly; the same hours spent in waiting for a 
friend who had promised to come appear extremely long, 
since we are constantly preparing ourselves for his enter- 
ing by continued tension, which forces itself into the center 
of our consciousness. If the time interval is very short, 
the consciousness of reactions becomes less important; we 
rely more on the fading of the first impression. If the in- 
terval is long, the number of actual experiences play a 
role of increasing importance. But every bit of music 
reminds us of the independence of our time consciousness 
from the mere number of contents; two bars may appear 
to us of the same length, although the one is composed of 
two tones and the other of thirty-two. 

Theoretically our chief point is that not the mere last- 
ing of any sensation, but a special combination of sensa- 
tions underlies the perception of time. The violin tone 
which fills one bar appears longer than another which fills 
a sixteenth of a bar, not because this tone sensation lasts 
longer, but because the two complex structures of tone and 
kinesthetic sensations which have been built up at the end 
of their sounding are different. If our content of con- 
sciousness which we have at the end of the tone of one 
bar's length by a magic spell were suddenly frozen in our 
mind and stayed on for a century, that violin tone would 
not appear to sound longer. If nothing changed in our 
consciousness, not even sensations of respiration or tension, 
and of course not visual or tactual sensations which would 
allow comparison, we should hear throughout the hundred 
years just a tone of one bar's length. 

The action theory would add, however, that the innerva- 
tion of these tension movements must influence the sensory 
process itself. The longer a noise or a light lasts, the 
longer the impulse for the tension is continued. This 
means a change in the central process, and we may assume 



160 PSYCHOLOGY 

that this is accompanied by the feeling of time value. 
Hence we should acknowledge a primary time element 
given with the immediate experience, while the subtler de- 
velopment would come with the experience of actual ten- 
sion and relaxation movements. But this primary time 
attribute would not simply depend upon the incoming 
current, but upon the discharge of the centrifugal system. 
The demands of the nativistic and of the genetic theory 
would then be harmonized in the field of time experience, 
too. 

Perception of Meaning. — Opinions might differ 
whether the simplest experiences of space and time really 
depend upon combinations of elements or belong to the 
single sensations. Such diversity of views is impossible, 
when we turn to the experiences of difference, number, 
change, movement, melody, speech, harmony, meaning, 
recognition and so on. In all these cases the existence of 
several elements in the unity of the perception is the essen- 
tial condition. But as the mere lasting of a sensation is 
not the same as a consciousness of its duration, the mere 
existence of different sensations is not in itself enough for 
the perception of difference. The hearing of different tones 
alone is not the consciousness of the interval; the experi- 
ence of several sensations is not a consciousness of their 
number. In each of these cases the transition from one 
stimulus to the other is an independent act produced by 
the combination, and this act is felt again in consciousness. 

We are at the borderland of mere perception, if we con- 
sider the consciousness of meaning. To be sure, nowhere 
is it more necessary to warn against the mixture of causal 
and purposive psychology. We are too easily inclined to 
interpret the meaning of a perception as if the mental 
state of perception pointed to other ideas. In the realm 
of purposive psychology, that is the true interpretation ; in 
causal psychology it would contradict the presuppositions. 
The perception as a content of consciousness cannot point 



PEECEPTION 161 

anywhere and cannot do anything, but simply has its ob- 
jective existence, and everything which we call its mean- 
ing must be contained in it. A word which we hear, a pic- 
ture which we see, a tool which we grasp, has meaning for 
us when the sense impression fuses with associations which 
indicate its relations. 

The word ''hat" or ''spoon" in our mother tongue has 
a meaning for us, but if we hear the words for the same 
things in Russian, they have no meaning. The sound sen- 
sations of the familiar words have been associated so fre- 
quently with various perceived hats or spoons that the re- 
produced image forms what many psychologists call an 
assimilation with the word. Our full perception of the 
words contains this added idea as a part. On the other 
hand, if we see the spoon or the hat itself, the per- 
ception has a meaning, because the hat associates itself 
with the idea of a head and the spoon with the idea of 
soup. Yet even the Russian word which we do not under- 
stand is not entirely devoid of meaning. Its meaning lies 
in the associated idea that this is meant as a communica- 
tion and that this communication does not awake the de- 
sired associations in us ; its meaning is that it is a foreign 
word. Thus the same group of sense impressions can 
awake perceptions with more or less developed meaning, ac- 
cording to the smaller or larger group of relations which 
are reflected in the associated elements. 

We insisted that the real test of a perception lies in the 
reaction with which we respond. We acknowledged a true 
perception only when a unified reaction was involved. 
Every new shade of meaning from new associated elements 
must vary the impulse to reaction. The development in 
the individual, however, must lead to an abbreviation of 
the total process by which the proper reaction sets in even 
when the associations from which it gets its meaning do 
not actually rise to consciousness. The motor setting, the 
inner readjustment to the appropriate reaction, then be- 



162 PSYCHOLOGY 

comes the meaning of the perception. The spoon and the 
hat may not arouse reproduced images, but a resetting of 
our whole central system. This makes it impossible to put 
the spoon on the head or the hat into the soup. We know 
their meaning, hecause we are prepared for an adjusted 
line of action. 

If we hear a question, the whole group of words becomes 
the object of one complex perception. It may be that none 
of the words awakes real associations in consciousness ; and 
yet we understand its meaning perfectly, because the words 
through their physiological connections have produced that 
central motor setting by which the appropriate answer is 
prepared. We understand the world because we act toward 
the world. But our real action is not the movements of 
our arms and fingers, of our lips and vocal cords, but the 
reorganization of our motor centers. In the view of the 
association theory the only conscious variations which can 
be recorded would be the assimilated associations of related 
objects, and the kinesthetic sensations resulting from the 
movements themselves or after-images of earlier move- 
ments. In the view of the action theory all this associa- 
tive material would be acknowledged, but would be con- 
sidered as secondary. The primary character of the mean- 
ing process would lie in this resetting of the motor system 
itself and its retroactive effect on the sensory processes. 
The sensory excitement itself would receive a new shading 
by the new setting in the reaction paths, and this would 
be accompanied on the psychological side by that new color- 
ing of the impression which we call its meaning. 

It is clear that the same object can have different mean- 
ings for different individuals, as the lines of action must 
vary in accordance with the habitual associations. The 
same stream which means to the boy a swimming place, to 
the sportsman a boating place, to the fisherman a fishing 
place, is to the manufacturer water power, to the chemist a 
combination of elements, to the landscape painter a silver 



PEECEPTION 163 

surface, to the engineer a place to be bridged over. The 
technical term for a perception in ivhich ilie relation to 
other objects preelominates is, by a tradition which has be- 
come slightly old-fashioned, apperception. 

An especially important case of apperception is recogni- 
tion. We perceive the object as identical with that of an 
earlier perception. At first this means that the impres- 
sion awakes, the association of the background in which we 
saw the object before. Not a copy of the earlier object 
enters consciousness, but a more or less vague idea of 
everything which was connected with the previous experi- 
ence. This involves a motor setting by which the reaction 
is adjusted not only to the present stimulus, but to this 
stimulus plus all the other stimuli which were connected 
with it before. The appropriate reaction is therefore not a 
new one for the individual, but a familiar one. The setting 
for the motor response is easily established, because the 
previous experiences have prepared the way. The inter- 
ference which may occur when new lines of action are 
opened is absent, and this smoothness of the jjrocess pro- 
duces a reaction which is felt as familiarity. A short cut 
is easily formed: the familiar object does not really arouse 
the association of the earlier accompaniments, but awakens 
directly this feeling of acquaintance and leads immediately 
to the habitual reaction. In the language of the action 
theory we should say again that it is the ease of the open- 
ing of the motor channels which influences the central 
process. 

The opposite process occurs when an object is expected 
and a different one appears, or if an entirely unfamiliar 
impression breaks in and demands reaction. AYhere the 
associations which give meaning to the perception are con- 
trary to the objective situation, we speak of an illiosion. 
AYe are under an illusion, if we mistake one person for an- 
other. The extreme cases are those which arise in the dis- 
eased mind, when the noises on the street are heard as the 



164 PSYCHOLOGY 

calling of abusive words. But emotional excitement favors 
illusions in the normal individual. Fear makes the wan- 
derer see the tree stump in the twilight as a highwayman. 
The emotion has opened those channels of discharge which 
lead the impression into wrong centrifugal directions and 
this reacts on the associations. The illusory elements may 
directly replace objective impressions. We replace the 
misprints by the correct letters, and hear in the spoken 
v/ords that which we expect. It is the illusory attitude and 
the falsely adjusted setting which makes the perception 
itself illusory. While in the illusion essential parts of the 
perception correspond to the objective stimuli and only 
the associative elements are erroneous, the hallucination is 
without basis in the outer world. The patient who hears 
voices in complete stillness, sees snakes in darkness, experi- 
ences reproduced sensations with the vividness of actual 
sense stimulations. The dream consists partly of such 
hallucinations, partly of illusions, since many bodily sense 
excitements are interwoven with associative elements in 
the free play of the dream perceptions. 



CHAPTER XII 

IDEAS 

Memory. — If the word ideas is used in its widest sense, 
the perceptions, too, are perceptive ideas, as against the 
memory ideas or the imaginative ideas or the abstract ideas 
and so on. In a narrower sense the term excludes the con- 
sciousness of the objects directly given to our senses and 
includes only those which are not immediately perceived, 
but are remembered, expected, fancied or conceived. A 
frequent usage in modern psychology is to substitute image 
for idea, and to call all ideational acts which are not based 
on sense perception acts of imagination. But we lose by 
that the term imagination for the important special func- 
tion of which we think when we speak of the poet's imagi- 
nation. Hence we shall retain the term ideation as the 
general function including memory, expectation, abstrac- 
tion and imagination. The elementary process which plays 
the chief role in this whole group of ideational functions 
is that of association, which we have traced. Yet it would 
be very narrow to consider the actual occurrence of 
memories, conceptions, and imaginations, as the mere prod- 
uct of associational processes. When we discussed percep- 
tion we saw that sense stimulation was the leading element, 
but we recognized that every perception demands, after .all, 
processes of reaction, association, and inhibition. In the 
same way we must understand that in every ideational act 
all four groups of the elementary processes are contribu- 
tory to the explanation. The 'associative process is based 
on that of stimulation, and involves reactions and inhibi- 
tions. 

165 



166 PSYCHOLOGY 

The memory idea renews previous perceptions. The re- 
production is never complete. Strictly speaking, the pres- 
ent memory idea only has similarity to the previous per- 
ception. Moreover it lacks, like all reproduced sensations, 
that peculiar immediacy of the sense impressions. The re- 
membered picture may conserve all the colors and differ- 
ences of light intensities, but it has that faded character 
in which the freshness of the direct perception is lost. 
How far the qualities are kept depends upon individual 
tendencies. Many remember no colors at all, but think of 
the past in white, gray and black ; others cannot reproduce 
tones well ; again with others the kinesthetic elements of 
the perception are predominant in the memory picture, or 
the tactual sensations; many lack distinct memories of 
smells and tastes, of temperature, and of pain. Often ele- 
ments are missing which were needed for the firm organiza- 
tion of the earlier picture ; the memory idea becomes vague 
and shifting. But this is in itself not necessary; a mem- 
ory image may be perfectly definite and constant. 

It may also be easily aided by new sense impressions, 
inasmuch as the kinesthetic sensations can readily be pro- 
duced anew through reaction movements. It is difficult to 
remember a name without an impulse to speak it, or to 
remember very marked forms without an impulse to follow 
their outlines by eye movements, or vivid actions without 
slight motor imitations. AVe sing internally the melody 
which we remember. Such movements may be carried out 
to a very slight degree only; and yet they may furnish 
fresh kinesthetic material to fill out some blanks in the 
memory reproduction. But the mere reproduction alone is 
not sufficient for a memory idea. It must contain a cer- 
tain reference to the past. This may be vague and even 
illusory, but somehow the idea must be surrounded by ele- 
ments which give to it its setting in the system of our past 
experience. 

The readiness of the material to return to consciousness 



IDEAS 167 

must be dependent upon the frequency, the recency, the 
vividness, and the emotional impressiveness of the original 
experiences and upon the present constellation of percep- 
tions and ideas in our mind. The individual differences 
in the ability to reproduce the connections of the world are 
not general but highly specialized. An excellent mem- 
ory for figures may go together with a miserable one for 
melodies, or for jokes, and an unfailing memory for words 
in poems may be coupled with a torturing inability to con- 
nect names with faces of acquaintances. "We must also 
discriminate the ability for immediate recall from that for 
lasting retention. On the whole, the power to retain what 
has once been learned is strongest in youth and decreases 
with maturity, while the ability for immediate recall is un- 
developed at an early age and improves slowly. 

The methods of acquiring the memory material with ref- 
erence to correct reproduction has been one of the most 
fertile fields of modern experimental psychology. The im- 
portance of the problem for educational purposes has 
strengthened the interest in this theoretical question. In 
order to trace the laws of pure memory action it was often 
important to exclude the connections of meaning. The fun- 
damental experiments have therefore been carried on chiefly 
with nonsense syllables. The influence of repetition or of 
the length of material or of the distribution of learning 
periods or of the accentuation of the material or of the 
interval between learning and reproduction or of the vari- 
ous senses could be determined by such method. 

Six syllables need only one presentation to be repeated 
correctly, while for the same person twelve syllables may 
demand fifteen repetitions and sixteen syllables thirty. 
With increasing length of time interval the exactitude falls 
off, at first rapidly, then slowly. A number of repetitions 
at one sitting is never as effective as the same number 
divided into several groups of repetitions. Rhythmical 
learning is a very effective help. Learning in large parts 



168 PSYCHOLOGY 

is much more economical than learning in little bits, how- 
ever much superficial impressions may seem to contradict 
this statement. The experiment can also neatly show how 
secondary connections are formed. The first syllable con- 
nects itself not only with the second, but to a certain degree 
with the third and fourth. Yet there is small tendency 
toward a backward connection. The ability to learn in- 
creases with training. The prejudice that a memory is 
good or bad by nature and that nothing can be acquired 
but external tricks of memorizing is untenable. 

One important factor is still little understood. Memory 
material sticks best to the mind when no new mental en- 
gagements follow the period of acquisition. If we hear a 
series of words, the learning is not completed when the last 
word enters our consciousness. If a class hears a series of 
twenty words, the average pupil may be able to repeat 
twelve of them after a pause of three minutes, if the class 
did nothing during the interval. But if during those three 
minutes every one had to multiply some figures, the average 
pupil may not be able to remember more than three or four 
words. It seems that the psychophysical process needs a 
certain physiological organization. The new memory ma- 
terial must settle down, and is lost if it is stirred up by 
other mental engagements. This process of settling can be 
observed also in cases of accidents, where a fall or a blow 
on the head destroys the memory for recent events. The 
last few hours before the blow are lost to memory. This 
shows that the recent impressions must be retained in a 
different form from the older ones. They are not suffi- 
ciently organized to be kept in the brain through such a 
crisis. 

The failing of memory is biologically no less important 
than its success. Where memory succeeds it brings us back 
part of our past in order to regulate our present reactions 
with the help of previous experience. It renews the ob- 
jective situations which were similar to the present ones 



IDEAS 169 

and allows us to adjust our actions to a much larger part of 
the world than that which reaches our senses at present. 
Yet this most useful function of memory would become a 
hindrance to unified action, if every signal renewed all 
the experiences which ever have been connected with it. 
A tumultuous overflooding of our mind would destroy the 
preparations for definite reaction. It is necessary that this 
mechanical power of reproduction be held in check in order 
to exclude everything which is not significant for the pres- 
ent situation. The mere chance impressions which awake 
no important reaction therefore leave practically no traces 
in our memory. TVe do not remember all the advertise- 
ments over which our eye had to glance in reading the 
newspaper, nor are we able to renew every street scene 
which we witnessed without interest. It is equally impor- 
tant that the material w^hich at first was held in memory 
fade away as its practical significance for new situations 
decreases. Finally the limitation of memory results from 
actual inhibition. The presence of certain ideas prevents 
the reappearance of others which are antagonistic. 

The extreme development of the positive memory func- 
tion may be found in the exceptional cases of mathematical 
or nausical prodigies or of famous polj^glots; the extremes 
of the negative functions show themselves in the patho- 
logical loss of memory. AYith the approach of old age a 
disintegration of memory sets in by which with surprising 
regularity first the remembrance of proper names fails, 
then the words for concrete objects, then the words for 
abstract ideas. In disease, however, the more characteristic 
feati.:re may be a general loss of memory for all the recent 
events, or a partial loss covering specific groups of sensory 
material. A widespread symptom of fatigue, especially 
among women, is the memory illusion by which a present 
experience is accompanied with the feeling that exactly 
this scene was lived through once before. 

The opposite of our memo^^'es are our expectations. Our 



170 PSYCHOLOGY 

expectation links the ideas with the future as memory 
does with the past. Yet the material is the same. No ex- 
pectation can introduce elementary content which is not 
gathered from the past, and only its order is adjusted to 
the expected future conditions. The walk which we took 
yesterday and the walk which we expect to take to-morrow 
over the same road are before our mind in the same idea- 
tional state except that we are less bound in the combina- 
tion of elements in the idea of that which is still to come. 
But where this expectation is based on exact foresight or 
calculation, the idea projected into the future may have 
exactly the same definiteness as that referring to the past. 

This does not exhaust the time shades of our ideas. We 
may have ideas of present objects without perceptive char- 
acter. If we close our eyes we can imagine the room around 
us. Yet probably most of our ideas lack this time signal 
altogether. If the word apple links itself in our mind 
with the picture of the fruit or of an orchard, it is not an 
apple of the past or of the future or of the present ; it is 
temporally neutral, a mere reproduction of the qualitative 
elements. From the viewpoint of the action theory we can 
hardly overlook that these four time signals of our ideas 
are forms of psychophysical reaction. The future is that 
for which we are still preparing our act, the present that 
toward which we are acting, the past that with regard to 
which we can no longer act, so that our response cannot 
change it, and the temporally neutral is that which does 
not cause independent reactions, but enters into a larger 
complex which controls the response. 

Imagination. — The ideas which we have considered are 
reality ideas. They bring into consciousness the real ob- 
jects of past, present, and future. The ideas which the 
imagination produces share with them the character of the 
material, as even the wildest imagination cannot develop 
elementary contents which have not their origin in earlier 
perceptions. They also share with them the different tem- 



IDEAS 171 

poral relations. It is true that our imagination has its most 
natural hunting ground in the future, just as our reality 
consciousness most easily refers to the past in the form of 
memory ideas. But, as we saw that our memory finds its 
counterpart in our expectation, so our imaginative pic- 
turing of the future is balanced by the imaginative play 
on the past. Our fancy may adorn our personal memories 
and turn them into imaginative ideas or may enliven the 
reports of history. The child who treats a piece of wood as 
a doll or as a horse has his imagination playing on the 
present object. Finally a thing of beauty in the artist's 
mind is neither past nor present nor future. 

"What then characterizes the ideas of imagination? "We 
said that memory and expectation were controlled by ob- 
jective reality. The functions of the imagination are con- 
trolled by subjective demands, by feelings, emotions, inter- 
ests, and wishes. Certainly it is the same material as that 
which fills our memories, but it is brought into new com- 
binations which are freed from the control of reality in 
order to serve the personal desires. The creative poet 
builds up a world of events with the consciousness of their 
unreality, held together by the artistic emotion in his mind. 
"With perfect freedom he can repeatedly change them until 
the imaginative picture satisfies completely the feeling 
which inspired him. But without any genius any one can 
build his imaginative castles in the air which are to fulfill 
his hopes. Yet it is imagination, too. if gruesome pictures 
of dangers take hold of our mind under the pressure of our 
subjective fears and anxieties. 

Modern theories claim that even all our dreams are only 
the imaginative fulfillment of wishes which are suppressed 
in our conscious life. The scholar, too, works with imag- 
ination, however concrete and real his material may be. 
He does not allow his imagination to decide the objective 
facts which he studies, but he needs imagination to con- 
struct hypothetic possibilities, and in doing so his ideas do 



172 PSYCHOLOGY 

indeed yield to the subjective interest. As soon as his 
imagination has formed such inspired ideas, his sober re- 
search has to test them and to compare their consequences 
with the actual facts. The freedom of the imagination, of 
course, must not be misinterpreted as if it meant that the 
procedure in consciousness is less determined by the laws 
of psychophysical behavior than memory or expectation. 
The difference is only that the combination of elements is 
controlled by the emotional setting. Just those associations 
which are most frequent or most recent may be inhibited by 
the central feeling, and rare unusual associations may be 
reenforced by it. 

Where the imagination overpowers the world of percep- 
tion and memory so that the individual can no longer ad- 
just himself to the concrete surrounding life, we have a 
pathological symptom which may develop just as well 
under the pressure of depressing as of exciting emotions. 
"Within the limits of normal life the richest play of the 
imagination need not interfere with the demands of reality. 
It may relieve the pressure of reality without obscuring its 
demands. The fluctuations are extreme. No one can exist 
without memory, but a matter-of-fact life can be well car- 
ried on without a spark of imagination. Yet the will to 
serve reality is certainly not in itself an inhibition to the 
imaginative impulse : on the contrary, just as the true 
scholar needs the stimulus of imagination, so no one can 
attain high goals in any sphere of life who is not lifted by 
a constructive imagination. 

General Ideas. — 'We emphasized that not only the 
imaginative ideas, but even the most faithful memory ideas 
lack elements of the original impression and add foreign 
elements suggested by the constellation of consciousness. 
We may remember the big tree before our house, but it is 
impossible that every little branch and every leaf should be 
in the memory picture as it was in the original. The re- 
production must necessarily be still further removed from 



IDEAS 173 

the earlier impressions which, contribute to it, when the 
situation points equally to a large number of previous per- 
ceptions. If I hear the botanist speaking of an elm tree, 
the picture of the elm tree before my house has no more 
right to illustrate that tree idea than a thousand other elm 
trees which I have seen. If all were rushing to my con- 
sciousness they would inhibit one another. I should not 
get any details, and at the best certain chief features which 
recur in all those similar pictures would arise in vague 
outlines. Sometimes a process of this type occurs, a com- 
posite memory picture into which many single experiences 
have entered with equally strong influence. 

Yet this is certainly not the typical form of a general 
idea. Usually it would even be impossible to form such 
compressed pseudo-memories. What a monster that con- 
ception of animal would be which is amoeba, spider, snake, 
and elephant at the same time ! In most cases we find by 
our selfobservation a very different content of conscious- 
ness. In a botanical discussion I may think of tree in gen- 
eral, and refer to all possible trees in the world ; and yet I 
may find in my consciousness only the picture of that one 
tree which stands before my window. It performs its task 
in the mechanism of my mental operations just as well as 
if I had pictures of all imaginable trees. Why? Because 
now this one tree picture does not enter into the same men- 
tal relation as it would if it were meant as a memory pic- 
ture of the one tree. What changes the total situation is 
the different attitude, the motor setting of preparation for 
further developments in my psychophysical system. I treat 
this one tree as standing for all the trees in the universe. 
It is only a cue for the opening of all the channels of dis- 
charge which are needed for reaction toward trees in gen- 
eral. This response in the system allows us to feel that any 
other tree would perform the function just as well. The 
image of one or another is then only a kind of mental ap- 
pendix. The attitude is the really essential condition by 



174 PSYCHOLOGY 

which the word with the representative image, or even 
without it, gains the value of a general idea. Again we 
have here a case where the attitude itself shades the central 
process. 

This attitude character of the general idea presents itself 
still more clearly in a second type. We may form a con- 
cept not only by putting together a large number of simi- 
lar experiences and abstracting from that which is different 
in them, but by building it up from the elements which its 
definition suggests. The word which designates the con- 
cept then comes to us as a demand. It does not awake a 
composite memory or any particular substitute for it, but 
it stirs up the demand to admit only such ideas as suit the 
definition. The conceptions with which the lawyer or the 
mathematician or the philosopher works are words which 
demand a particular attitude through which the further 
mental response is controlled. The pictures which the 
memory or the imagination contributes as fringes of the 
conception are merely secondary means to vivify it, to hold 
it actively in consciousness and to insure the openness of 
the channels of attitude. The difference between theft 
and burglary in the lawyer's discussion is entirely inde- 
pendent of the question whether some specimens from the 
rogues' gallery are lingering in the mind, when the con- 
ceptions are thought in the meaning of their definitions. 
The younger the mind, the more we find tendencies to con- 
nect concrete pictures with a conceptional word. If asso- 
ciation experiments are carried on with children, the words 
usually awake individual memories. The habit of connect- 
ing the word with a generalized attitude develops slowly, 
and also in adult individuals remains very unequal. A too 
early habit of thinking in words only is found more in 
nervous than in normal, healthy children. 

The closing word in the study of ideas must be the warn- 
ing against a purposive interpretation in the midst of 
causal psychology. This danger of confusing the aspects 



IDEAS 175 

is nowhere nearer than in the discussion of the thought 
processes of which the general ideas are the vehicles. It is 
as true of the conception as of the perception that it does 
not point to anything beyond itself. It is simply a given 
process in consciousness. It has no internal relation, but 
only certain effects in our psychophysical system. Its 
meaning consists of certain elements in it and of certain 
influences on the succeeding processes. Its meaning is not 
an inner reference to something which lies outside of it. 
Neither the perceptive idea nor the memory idea nor the 
imaginative idea nor the abstract idea can mean anything 
outside of itself, as long as we remain in the world of 
causal psychology. 



CHAPTER XIII 
ACTIVITY 

The Impulse Feeling. — If we had to divide all the men- 
tal processes in the individual into two large groups we 
might consider the perceptions, the memories, the fancies, 
the conceptions with which we have dealt so far as one 
class, and the inner activities and emotions which we are 
now to discuss as the other. The former reflects the world 
in our mind ; the latter reflects our own personal response 
to the world. Yet such a division is after all for the pur- 
poses of causal psychology a superficial one. It is still 
influenced too much by the reminiscence of purposive psy- 
chology. If we ask for the meaning of those mental ex- 
periences, there cannot be any more fundamental contrast 
than that between the world and our self. But if we study 
the structure of the experiences as mental processes in con- 
sciousness, the perception of the changing things and the 
consciousness of our acting self are similar in their or- 
ganization and constitution. Both are the products of the 
same elementary processes of stimulation, association, reac- 
tion, and inhibition. 

We turn to the activities. They are not dependent 
upon external movement effects. To seek a name which 
we have forgotten, to solve a problem, to turn our atten- 
tion to an idea, to reason out a conclusion, or to make a 
decision is just as much an inner activity as the instinctive 
impulse to run or to fight or the deliberate reply to a 
question. The word "will" has become rather colorless in 
causal psychology, but after all it serves best to suggest 

176 



ACTIVITY 177 

the common factor in all the inner activities. There is 
a will factor in attention and thought and constructive 
imagination as well as in desire and impulse, decision and 
choice. 

What is this common trait? It certainly cannot be 
found in a particular element. Wherever the self observer 
stops his introspective analysis with the belief that he can 
discover a special will element in all or some of these proc- 
esses, he is misled by an illusion which can easily be under- 
stood. He has not freed himself from the first demand of 
purposive psychology. The unity of the meaning of will 
and the incomparable character of the will act in real life 
exert a spell on his power of introspection. He does not 
analyze the will, because he does not take it as an object in 
consciousness; but he experiences the will by feeling it in- 
stead of by observing it. As soon as the will is looked on as 
an objective process it can and must 'be resolved into ele- 
ments each of which in itself is without will character. It 
is the form of their combination which constitutes the 
process of inner activity. The will is then complex as much 
as an idea is complex. 

The process of inner activity demands at least two con- 
scious factors. A change must go on, and an idea of the 
result of this change must precede the process. Every- 
thing else is secondary. If we do not anticipate the end, 
we do not experience a will process. Wherever an end 
which can be reached by our own deed is held in mind be- 
fore the action itself sets in, we feel that we are acting by 
our own volition. It makes no difference whether the end 
is a performance of our muscles or a shifting of our 
thoughts, whether we move things or select words. If I 
try to remember a telephone number, and it finally comes 
to my mind, I feel its appearance as the result of my will 
effort. I was seeking the number and secured it by my 
volition. Of course the digits themselves were not antici- 
pated in consciousness; I did npt really have the number 



178 PSYCHOLOGY 

in my mind; otherwise I should not have sought it. But 
what I was seeking was, after all, something which was 
fully determined beforehand in my mind. I knew that it 
was a number which I had heard and which I had used be- 
fore, and therefore that unknown thing in my mind was 
really identical with what I finally found, when the right 
figures slipped in. 

If we have to do with an external action, if I rise to take 
down a book in my library, it seems as if a new element had 
come in. Here, too, the end is in my mind beforehand. I 
think of the taking of the book before I move my arm to it. 
And again it is fundamental that the foregoing idea of the 
end correspond to the final effect. Yet it seems as if the 
most essential part were left out after all. Is there not a 
mental process, a feeling of impulse, an act of decision, 
between my thinking of the book and my getting up and 
grasping it ? Is not the whole mystery of the will inclosed 
and hidden in this feeling of impulse? But a careful 
analysis can disentangle this last impulse experience, too. 
If I think of taking down the book, the whole action de- 
pends upon the first step, the getting up from my chair. 
While I have the book in mind, I am conscious that I need 
a series of movements before I can reach it. The entering 
upon the first movement decides whether the total action 
unified by its final end is to be carried out. Accordingly I 
must have in consciousness the idea of the first motion as 
the real cue for the entire process. 

This kinesthetic idea of the first movement preceding 
the action itself is the only content which we call the feel- 
ing of impulse. It is indeed of decisive character, inasmuch 
as this idea of the first movement leads to the movement 
itself. But if this is the situation, the impulse feeling 
is again only a special case of the general rule which 
we stated, that the change must be preceded by the idea of 
the effect. The kinesthetic sensation, which is the result of 
the first movement, is anticipated and precedes the move- 



ACTIVITY 179 

ment itself. Hence we have the feeling that it is a volitional 
procedure, and feel the forerunner as the impulse for the 
whole act. AVe have, accordingly^, no impulse feeling for 
a movement which we have never performed ; we must 
first have acquired the impressions from actually carrying 
it out in order to gain the arising sensations as associative 
material which we can awake before the movement is car- 
ried out again. 

But while the consciousness of movement which is pre- 
ceded by the kinesthetic sensation is a typical case of will 
activity and the one case which is most easily misinter- 
preted as the intrusion of a special will power, it is surely 
not the most frequent experience nor the original one. The 
end before our mind is generally not the movement itself, 
but an indirect result of the movement, a change in the 
outer world, and the first motion is not felt as an independ- 
ent goal, but is entirely subordinated to the complex activ- 
ity, ^ly idea of the book which I am to take from the shelf 
may be the only pacemaker for the action, and that first 
auxiliary movement of rising from the chair may be so sub- 
servient to the whole process that a special anticipation of 
this first kinesthetic idea as a cue for the whole is left out. 
The idea of taking the book sets the complete chain of 
muscle processes in motion. A special impulse feeling is 
then lacking, and yet I feel the getting of the book as the 
result of my inner activity, because the idea preceded. If 
I had gone to the shelf, while the anticipated idea was to 
open the window, the outer process would have been the 
same, but it would have appeared involuntary. 

The Rivalry of Motives. — The consciousness of self- 
participation which characterizes every will act is reen- 
forced, when several ideas of possible ends are anticipated. 
I think of taking the book from the shelf, but I also think 
of glancing over the newspaper on my desk. Whichever 
of the two actions I perform the end was in consciousness 
beforehand. I finally decide to let the paper alone and to 



180 PSYCHOLOGY 

rise for the book. What was added to the process? Pos- 
sibly nothing at all in my consciousness. Everything which 
happened may have happened outside of it. And yet it is 
clear that somewhere a complex rivalry must have gone on. 
"We must take it that each of the two anticipated ideas was 
influencing the channels of discharge. The idea of the 
book excited those motor centers which would make me 
leave my place to get the book, and the idea of the paper 
hammered on other centers which would hold me back at 
my desk. One group offered less resistance than the other, 
or the stimulus was strengthened by accessory physiological 
excitements, and when the one started the movement proc- 
ess, the other became inhibited. The message which came 
to consciousness was only the perception of the actual ris- 
ing and getting the book. But while this may be the only 
experience in consciousness, it is possible and even prob- 
able that secondary features were added. In the struggle 
between book and newspaper with their two different motor 
effects, auxiliary associations may have been stirred up to 
aid the one or the other or both sides. The longer the 
rivalry went on, the more I may have thought of the ad- 
vantages and disadvantages, of the comforts and of the 
displeasures, of the scholarship which I gain from the one 
and the politics which I learn from the other, and finally 
ideas of my principles and of my moral obligations may 
have found their way to consciousness and may have helped 
to break open the channels for the discharge into the one 
direction. 

The essential part in this rivalry was the process in the 
centrifugal paths, and that throws light on the whole situa- 
tion. We must take it for granted that even where such 
rivalry does not exist and only one idea of action is before 
us, the mere conscious processes are not the only important 
parts. In consciousness we find nothing but the antici- 
pated idea of the end and the perception of the movement 
which leads to it. Everything else which happens in the 



ACTIVITY 181 

field of awareness is auxiliary, but not essential. But there 
is evidently one other essential part, only it lies outside of 
consciousness. The anticipated idea must be more than a 
mere association ; it must be an idea plus such an influence 
on the whole brain setting that the action toward a definite 
goal is prepared. This effect of the idea of an end on the 
setting of the nervous centers is usually described as its 
determining tendency, and this phrase serves well as long 
as we keep it free from any purposive meaning. It is a 
strictly causal process. The idea does not aim toward the 
end, but it is a picture of the end, and its influence outside 
of consciousness is an automatic reaction. 

It is easy to understand how the individual acquires this 
complex organization in which actions are preceded by the 
ideas of their ends. This is certainly never the starting 
point in the growth of the child 's mind. The beginning is 
a disposition in the brain to respond to impressions with 
simple adjusted reactions. The infant answers the sweet 
milk immediately by a sucking movement, and as the ex- 
periment has shown, reacts on ammonia by face movements 
of rejection a few minutes after birth. All the early move- 
ments, grasping what touches the hand, following the light 
with the eyes, withdrawing from the painful, pressing to- 
ward the pleasant, and so on, result from inborn connec- 
tions. They are not mere mechanical reflexes without con- 
sciousness like the breathing movements, but they are not 
will actions either, as the consciousness of the effect does 
not precede the actual movement. No doubt the imitation 
impulse also has this immediate character. 

Each movement, however, produces kinesthetic sensa- 
tions. The consciousness experiences, accordingly, at first 
the stimulus, and after that the perception of the move- 
ment process. This movement sensation becomes associated 
with the impression, and the next stage must be that the 
impression awakes a reproduction of the movement sensa- 
tion before the action is performed. This would mean that 



182 PSYCHOLOGY 

the bodily movement is anticipated In consciousness before 
it is carried out. But from this second stage the mind 
passes on to a third. The two associated states, the impres- 
sion and the movement sensation, fuse into a unit with the 
result that the motor process which was originally stirred 
up by the impression becomes also the effect of the kines- 
thetic sensation. Hence the idea of the movement produces 
the movement itself. The kinesthetic sensation, however, is 
not the only sensory effect of the movement. It also 
produces external changes, sounds of the voice which can 
be heard, displacements of objects which can be seen, ap- 
proach to or rejection of things which can be felt. The 
perception of these end effects passes through the same two 
stages. They also come to be anticipated, and finally to be 
starting points for the movements themselves. The idea 
of the end to be reached sets into action all the psycho- 
physical processes which lead to the realization. 

The fundamental importance of this anticipation is clear. 
As long as the motor responses are automatic, the brain has 
na opportunity to check the consequences by inhibiting the 
action. But as soon as the stage is reached at which the 
outer situation awakes the idea of the end responses before 
the movement sets in, everything is changed. This idea of 
the effect can be associated with all its consequences. It 
may stir up the feeling that it is undesirable or even dan- 
gerous, that it conflicts with other plans or with our prin- 
ciples. Any one of these feelings and ideas would suggest 
the ideas of opposite actions. Several possible end actions 
are then anticipated in the mind. They enter into rivalry. 
The idea which gets the strongest support from ready as- 
sociations and from the preparedness for the action will be 
victorious. The fact that an idea of the end precedes the 
action becomes in this way the real condition of our respon- 
sibility. Only in this case can the movement be accredited 
to the total personality with all its acquired dispositions 
and its experiences. The action with the preceding idea of 



ACTIVITY 183 

the end is really our own action and gives us that feeling 
of personal inner activity which characterizes even the 
most rudimentary form of will, and which comes to its 
fullest growth in the action of choice among different ends. 

The experimental psychologist can study its details in the 
miniature will deed which the reaction experiment of the labora- 
tory involves. The simplest laboratory arrangement would be 
this. The subject expects the flashing of a light and is to 
respond to it as quickly as possible by pressing an electric key. 
The time from the light stimulus to the key movement is about 
180 thousandths of a second measured by an electric chrono- 
scope. But if the instruction is to anticipate in the mind not 
the coming of the light, but to concentrate the attention on the 
movement to be performed, the time sinks to perhaps 140 thou- 
sandths of a second. The anticipation of the kinesthetic sensa- 
tions has opened the channels of discharge and removed the re- 
sistance so fully that the light excitement shoots into the mus- 
cles with much greater rapidity. If instead of one light im- 
pression, one of two possibilities is presented, a red or a blue 
light, and only the red one is to be responded to, while the blue 
is to be disregarded, the reaction for the red comes nearer to 
300 thousandths of a second. And from such simple starting 
points the experiment may lead to more and more complicated 
arrangements by which the inner action can be analyzed through 
the study of the varying times needed for the responses. 

Complex Actions. — As soon as the various ideas of 
ends lead to the fitting movements, the material is given 
from which the mind can build up the highly organized 
will structures. The mind masters the complex task by 
resolving the process into its parts which have to cooper- 
ate. At first each part must be willed; that is, for each 
the idea of the end must be associated with the fit response. 
By repetition this connection must become automatic, until 
it is finally subordinated to the idea of a more distant goal. 
The will action of writing or of typewriting or of piano 
playing involves the training for many simpler actions, 



184 PSYCHOLOGY 

which at first had to be true will actions, but which became 
mechanized so that the idea of writing a word with the pen 
or with the machine or of playing a melody is in itself 
sufficient to bring the whole set of appropriate nerve cen- 
ters into activity. Everywhere we start with the auto- 
matic movement, develop it into the will movement, or- 
ganize a number of them into more complex will 
movements, and repeat the combination tmtil it becomes it- 
self habitual and thus an automatic movement at the service 
of more remote will ends. 

The strongest force in this development is the influence 
of the pain and pleasure feelings. The painful impression 
is the most definite starting point for an immediate reac- 
tion of withdrawing or of rejecting, and the pleasure the 
most definite source of the movement by which the impres- 
sion is made to continue. Correspondingly the pleasure and 
displeasure in the more remote effects of actions furnish 
constant aid in the organization of the will aggregates. 
Yet as the eyes follow any source of light and the head 
turns in the direction of a sound, and the hand responds 
to a touch on its palm without any special feeling of pleas- 
ure or pain, it may be said of the whole development from 
the lowest to the highest forms that the reactions may fol- 
low from any idea of an end without involving a charac- 
teristic feeling tone. The feeling helps and regulates and 
will be ultimately the strongest factor of decision, but no 
small part of the routine of our life consists of will actions 
in which the idea of the end is effective and determines the 
setting of the brain centers without any conscious feeling 
accent. 

We are accustomed to report still another class of actions, 
the instinct actions. They are usually treated as a new 
mental type in addition to reflex actions, automatic ac- 
tions, will actions and choice actions. Yet have we really a 
right to treat the instinct actions as an additional class? 
Ought we not rather to acknowledge that from a psycho- 



ACTIVITY 185 

logical point of view they offer no new features? They 
may be automatic actions; they may be volitional actions; 
they may even be choice actions : and it is a secondary 
aspect which is considered when we set off certain actions 
as the results of instinct. An instinctive action is one in 
which the ends that precede the action in consciousness are 
not really the final ends of the ivhole action. But if this 
characterizes the process, it is evident that it is the outside 
spectator who decides what end is to be acknowledged as 
final and not the experiencing subject. The acting indi- 
vidual experiences a stimulus and a reaction, that is, the 
typical form of his automatic reactions ; or he experiences 
the stimulus, the idea of an end and the reaction, that is, 
the typical form of his will actions. ^And now the out- 
sider, the scientist, comes and says that this automatic 
action served a useful end which was not in the mind of 
the individual, or that the will action, in which ideas of 
end were in the mind, served still other more distant ends. 

In both cases the psychophysical mechanism produces 
unforeseen effects. But psychologically this reference to an 
outlying end does not change the character of the automatic 
or volitional experience. If I am thirsty I drink Avater to 
discontinue my unpleasant feeling of thirst. Psycho- 
logically this stands in the rank and file with any automatic 
reaction or will reaction by which I remove an unpleasant 
feeling. Physiologically I may recognize that this drink- 
ing of water is very useful inasmuch as the thirst feeling 
was only an indication that there was too little liquid in 
my arteries and that I needed additional fluid for my 
health. I may call the impulse to quench my thirst in- 
stinctive, because it serves that ultimate end, which I did 
not consider in drinking. But as a psychological experi- 
ence the thirst reaction is not changed. 

The sexual instinct ser^^es, from a higher point of view, 
the continuation of the race, but as a psychological experi- 
ence and as a psychophysical process the sexual reaction is 



186 PSYCHOLOGY 

an automatic impulse in response to sexual feelings, con- 
trolled by the desire to continue and heighten them. The 
play instinct may serve the individual in training him for 
work, but the kitten which catches the spool does not ex- 
perience another kind of action because the biologist is able 
to connect this automatic response with the later need of 
the cat to be able to catch the scampering mouse. Nor does 
the child when he seeks the pleasures and joys of running 
and jumping and fighting and playing ball, have a differ- 
ent experience, because the sociologist recognizes the help- 
fulness of these actions for the skillful and courageous be- 
havior of the future man. 

"Whenever the biologists have studied the instincts of 
animals, like those apparently mysterious ones of insects or 
birds, they have always found that the actual operation can 
be analyzed into simple automatic responses and feeling 
reactions. There is no subconscious idea of the final end. 
The responses are direct reactions on external stimuli or 
on internal bodily irritations. The bird builds its nest or 
flies to the south in the fall, the ants heap up their anthills, 
and the bees build their hives without doing more than 
going through a chain of automatic reactions, the effect of 
the one often serving as stimulus for the next. If hin- 
drances are artificially introduced, the same automatic 
reactions may lead to destructive results, and the result 
follows no less where exceptional conditions make it use- 
less or dangerous. The fact that animal and man are born 
with inherited dispositions through which such automatic 
and volitional reactions are favored as serve the conserva- 
tion of the individual and of the species, is strictly biologi- 
cal. The instincts do not introduce any new type of psy- 
chological experience. 

It is usually claimed that the instincts are much more 
numerous in animals than in man. But this is hardly cor- 
rect. The actions of the animals, especially of the insects 
and of the crustaceans, are more uniform, because they live 



ACTIVITY 187 

under more constant life conditions, and the final biological 
ends can therefore always be reached through the same 
automatic reactions. The larger the compass of life con- 
ditions to which the individual must adjust itself, the 
greater is the flexibility needed to adjust the responses to 
the surrounding in the interest of the ultimate ends. The 
reaction must be more variabJe and must be preceded by 
more complex ideas of immediate ends. In the highest 
forms the response must involve all the transactions of in- 
telligent thought. But even in those most variable, most 
flexible and most complicated forms, the ends before the 
mind of the acting individual are usually not the final 
aims with which biological sociology may connect them. 
Man in his volitional intelligent action serves ends which 
lie beyond the immediate interest of his intelligence, as 
much as the ends of the child's action lie beyond his im- 
mediate conscious experience. From this higher point of 
view such intelligent action of the will is just as much in 
stinctive action. We may serve our life as a whole, while 
we think that we are selecting the action to serve the de- 
sires of the hour, and we may serve mankind, while we be- 
lieve that we are serving ourselves. 

Attention. — If the experience of inner activity depends 
upon the consciousness of a change in ourselves preceded 
by the idea of the effect, it cannot make a difference whether 
the change which we perceive is a movement of our body 
or the shifting of our ideas. If we try to remember a for- 
gotten name and it appears in consciousness, or if we try 
to solve a problem and the solution is finally reached, a 
change is going on of which the effect is anticipated, and 
we feel it as our inner activity just as much as if the end 
were the catching of a ball. Memories or imaginative ideas 
or general ideas may arise by mere association without any 
preceding consciousness of an end. Our remembering, 
imagining and thinking is then involuntary. But our mem- 
ory is often, our imagination still more often, and our 



188 PSYCHOLOGY 

thinking almost always, voluntary in its character. The 
witness guides his memory, the artist controls his imagina- 
tion, the scholar masters his thought. 

f We will consider first the act of attention. Any 
content of our consciousness can become the object of our 
attention, and in every case the attention itself is felt as 
an inner activity. This seems to be contradicted by the 
traditional separation of voluntary and involuntary atten- 
tion. We give our voluntary attention to the words of a 
friend to whom we listen, but our involuntary attention to 
the noise of an explosion which interrupts the conversation. 
The voluntary attention is certainly felt as an inner ac- 
tivity, but does the involuntary not lack this activity char- 
acter? It seems passive and not active. These terms are 
misleading. The so-called involuntary attention is felt no 
less as an inner activity. Only the motives for this inner 
action are in the two cases different. If something striking 
or sudden or very intense or very different from the back- 
ground or very familiar among unfamiliar surroundings 
comes to our perception, the inner activity awakes immedi- 
ately, while in other cases associated ideas or feelings lead 
to it. We may be forced into that inner activity and may 
even accompany it with the feeling that we should prefer 
to direct the attention in another direction if we could, and 
yet wherever it is directed, it remains distinctly our own 
activity. 

What is the aim which is common to all mediate and im- 
mediate processes of attention? Perhaps we might char- 
acterize the end most briefly by saying that we iurn our 
attention to an object in order to get more of it. This in- 
deed covers every possible case. Something is in our mind, 
but it is vague, indistinct, obscure, or in a form in which 
it is unfit to serve as Toothold for an action, or expressed 
in terms in which no associations, no words, no further 
thoughts can be linked with it, or in which it would not 
stick to memory, or in which its consequences do not appear. 



ACTIVITY 189 

We want to get more of it, we want to recognize its de- 
tails, we want to have a fuller impression of it, we want 
to see those aspects which allow an adjusted response, 
we want to secure those elements in it which suggest 
definite associations and thoughts, we want the whole 
where we had only a part, the clear where we had 
only the vague, the expressed where we had only a 
hint. 

We may discriminate four processes which are combined 
in every full act of attention. First the content becomes 
more vivid, that is, it impresses itself more strongly on the 
mind. This brings with it an increase in clearness. The 
content stands out more distinctly from the background 
and its various elements become more sharply separated 
from one another. But the vividness and not the clearness 
seems to be the primary change. This increase of vividness 
is certainly not identical with an increase of intensity. 
The more intense will have a greater chance to draw our 
attention and to become vivid in our mind, but the direct- 
ing of the attention toward the faint impression does not 
ordinarily make it more intense. We may turn our atten- 
tion to any instrument in the orchestra without in the least 
changing the relative strength of the tones. The experi- 
ment can show that if we compare the intensity of two suc- 
cessive impressions one of which is observed with attention, 
while the other is noticed in a state of distraction, the 
strength of the attended one is not overestimated. The 
second characteristic feature of the process of attention is 
that the objects not attended decrease in vividness. Again 
it is not a question of a decrease in intensity. They lose 
their impressiveness and therefore they become less clear, 
less distinct; they fade away and may finally be entirely 
inhibited. Not only memories and thoughts are suppressed, 
but the sense stimuli, too, become ineffective. Our attention 
either to the book in our hand or to the plan in our head 
may cut off the piano playing in the neighborhood, the 



190 PSYCHOLOGY 

ache in the sore finger and the memory of an engagement 
for the next hour. 

The third factor consists of the mental and physical ac- 
tivities which start from the attended perception or idea. 
Impulses to bodily movements, trains of thought, associa- 
tions and feelings, develop from the attended object, while 
everything not attended loses its hold on our actions. The 
content on which the attention focuses thus- becomes the 
center from which all the further psychophysical develop- 
ments irradiate. And fourthly, the body adjusts itself to 
the center of attention and this adjustment sends kines- 
thetic sensations to consciousness. When the attention 
is directed to an external object, this bodily reaction in- 
volves above all the adjustment of the sense organs; a 
sharp fixation, the movements of listening, sniffing, delib- 
erate movements of the tongue, and searching finger move- 
ments. 

Moreover, the end organs are held in fixed positions in 
order to secure the fullest possible impression. The neck 
stiffens, the arm and hand muscles are strained, the respira- 
tion is regulated, the muscles of the forehead are contract- 
ed ; in extreme cases the whole body is cramped. When the 
object is not external these movements of adjustment may 
nevertheless play a considerable role, and it is doubtful 
whether they are ever entirely absent. Certain contractions 
in the eye muscles or in the neck or in the forehead or in 
the chest result as automatic reactions where no new per- 
ception is involved, and if the movements themselves are 
absent, at least reproduced kinesthetic sensations readily 
enter into consciousness. These bodily sensations are espe- 
cially fit to reenforce the feeling of personal activity in the 
process of attention. 

These four processes are not the result of attention, but 
are themselves the attention. Each may be present in any 
degree, and the whole complex process will change greatly 
with the character of the object, but the essentials remain 



ACTIVITY 191 

the same in every case. The question can be only whether 
these four factors are simply in a chance combination or 
whether they belong necessarily together. Our discussion 
on inhibition has answered this question fully, and we af- 
firmed most earnestly the second alternative. The vivid- 
ness of one content of consciousness and the inhibition of 
other contents are two sides of the same process. Moreover, 
both are most intimately connected with the reenforcement 
of the actions and thoughts related to the vivid and with 
the suppression of the actions and thoughts related to the 
inhibited content. The processes of bodily adjustment 
finally are themselves only parts of the movements by which 
the system responds to the attended object. 

As long as we do not recognize the interrelation of these 
four factors we cannot understand why certain elements 
are inhibited, while others are reenforced. As soon as we 
link both with actions we understand that the antagonistic 
actions exclude one another, and if we accept the views of 
the action theory, we see that the enforcing of one action 
not only secures the vividness of the corresponding idea, 
but inhibits at the same time the opposite action and sup- 
presses by that the ideas which would lead to that oppo- 
site train of behavior. The suppressing of these counter- 
acting ideas reenforces again those which lead to actions 
and thoughts in the other direction, this increases their 
vividness, and so we move in a complete circle by which 
the psychophysical system secures the fullest possible ef- 
fectiveness of the attended impression or idea. In the case 
of the immediate attention the character of the stimulus or 
the feeling tone of the idea breaks open the channels of 
discharge ; in the case of mediate attention our associa- 
tions prepare the centrifugal reaction and by their in- 
fluence on the whole setting of the psychophysical system 
they produce an attitude of readiness by which the other- 
wise indifferent idea or impression becomes the center of 
influence. 



192 PSYCHOLOGY 

This associative preparation may precede the perception. 
If we show in the laboratory cards on which a dozen little 
forms, squares, circles, triangles, crescents are given in 
various colors, for a very short time, and instruct the 
observer beforehand to give his attention only to the colors, 
he may see the yellowness of the triangle but not its shape ; 
and if we ask him to give his attention only to the form 
he may know that it was an ellipse, but not that it was 
green. A full preparatory adjustment of attention de- 
mands one to two seconds. The inner setting for a par- 
ticular kind of attention is the result of our whole inborn 
disposition and our training. Every acquired habit of 
action and thought must influence the distribution of open 
and closed channels of discharge. Our whole education 
decides not only what perceptions and ideas we may select 
as centers of our mediate attention, but it decides no less 
what impressions and thoughts will have power to fascinate 
our immediate attention. A dozen people may read the 
same newspaper, and the attention of each may be drawn 
to another column. 

The Thought Process. — The attention to an experience 
is the inner activity by which we get more of it in order 
to gain a new starting point for our psychophysical reac- 
tions. This process of getting more of it may be devel- 
oped to any degree of complexity. One of the most im- 
portant cases is that in which the attended object becomes 
enriched by all the relations which our mind can add as the 
result of earlier experiences. The final result of the inner 
activity is then practically a new experience which gives 
a new basis for mental and bodily response. In this case 
we call the total process thinking. Every thought is psy- 
chologically a prolonged attention process. The starting 
point is an experience which does not allow us sufficient 
hold for an internal reaction. We do not know how to be- 
have with regard to it. Now we try to get more of it with 
the aim of securing such aspects of it as allow a fit re- 



ACTIVITY 193 

sponse. The object may be a single thing or a whole 
situation or the total universe, or it may be a relation of 
things, symbolized by a word, or a relation of abstract 
ideas. Anything can be the starting point for our effort 
to reshape the experience under the influence of earlier 
experiences and under the control of the idea of the needed 
response. 

Such thinking may be unformulated. If we meet a dan- 
gerous situation which demands an action, all the conse- 
quences which may develop in the next few seconds may 
be considered in the light of earlier associations and the 
immediate impression may be enlarged into an entirely new 
complex, which forces us to the appropriate action; and 
yet this whole thought process may not have involved any 
words. The physician who thinks about a symptom of the 
patient and makes his diagnosis of the disease in order to 
give him the right aid, may think exclusively in the images 
of earlier experiences in the hospital without introducing 
word thoughts. All practical managing and arranging de- 
mands much thought, and even very concentrated thought, 
with many way stations before the end is reached ; and yet 
all may go on without words. The formulated thought, 
which moves from premises to conclusions contains the 
earlier experiences of the individual or of mankind in 
positive and negative judgments, which allow the knowl- 
edge of civilization to be made serviceable to the richer 
unfolding of the given situation. But however complicated 
the thought process may become, the essential point re- 
mains the anticipation of the end before the enlargement of 
the situation occurs. 

The explanation of the process must naturally move 
along the same line on which the explanation of attention 
proceeded, as fundamentally the same facts are involved. 
We anticipate the final situation, on which we are able to 
react. This anticipation gives us the feeling of inner ac- 
tivity. But this anticipation is not only a conscious ex- 



194 PSYCHOLOGY 

perience, but above all a new psychophysical setting. The 
attended idea unfolds through the various thought asso- 
ciations under the steady influence of this anticipated 
setting. Every group of ideas which harmonizes with it 
becomes reenforced, and the antagonists which would in- 
terfere with the setting remain inhibited. The end situa- 
tion, which allows action, thus precedes the thought as an 
idea with determining tendencies, not in a purposive, but 
in a strictly psychophysical sense. The most powerful 
element in the thought movement lies in this preparatory 
seiting which is itself not represented in consciousness. 
The truly conscious elements of the process are therefore 
rather secondary. Images, kinesthetic sensations, above all 
words, may accompany these irradiating brain processes 
with their inhibiting and facilitating effects, but the pre- 
ciseness of the thought and the richness of elements which 
enter into the process will depend very little upon the 
full-fledged conscious representations and symbols. A 
world of experience may be condensed in a thought of 
which the various stages hardly enter consciousness and in 
which only bits of memories or of formulated judgments 
combined with kinesthetic impressions appear. The word 
which we speak as an answer to a question or the action 
which we perform as final decision in a complex situation 
may be the first conscious notice to us that the process of 
thought is completed. 

In the laboratory experiment we can trace these various 
developments by creating miniature situations which de- 
mand a reply, a decision, a conclusion, an action. Every 
demand of this kind is a test of the individual intelligence. 
Such thought processes in the laboratory or in practical 
life may leave the self observing subject with the feeling 
that he experienced the thought but that no contents could 
be found in his consciousness. His introspection seems 
fruitless. This has often led to the misunderstanding that 
there must be mental states which are incomparable with 



ACTIVITY 195 

the sensations, feelings and their reproductions, imageless 
thoughts which we know without finding them as objects. 
This reference to a mental thought which we know Avithout 
finding it in consciousness is a slipping back into purposive 
psychology, where the thought comes in question as a 
meaning only. In causal psychology we must acknowl- 
edge that the essential parts of the thought transaction 
are not mental experiences at all. Those fringes of mem- 
ories and words give us a hint that some processes are 
going on in our psychophysical system, and above all the 
definite anticipation of the end situation gives us the char- 
acteristic feeling that it is our own activity, but the funda- 
mental process is only physiological. 

If the end situation which we prepare is not a practical 
attitude, but an emotional one, the effort to get more of the 
attended object and to enlarge it by reproduction is no 
longer bound by the objective relations of the world. What 
is needed then is not thought, but imagination. A thought 
stands in the service of reality. Its correspondence to the 
world is its truth, and no action can be reasonable if it is 
not adjusted to the real world of experience. But if the 
end is the satisfaction of a feeling, the inner movement 
which transforms the situation and enriches it is inde- 
pendent of the rigid laws of nature and may move in the 
ideas of the fairy tale and in the fancies of the artist. But 
as the final end, the fulfillment of a particular emotional 
demand precedes these imaginative changes, too, the whole 
artistic production may be felt as a voluntary inner activity 
as much as the truth-bound thought of the thinker. 



CHAPTER XIV 
INNER STATES 

Pleasure and Displeasure. — Throughout we have been 
separating artificially the experiences which are blending 
in the unity of our life. No other way was open to us, if 
we were really to describe and to explain them. We had 
to deal with the perceptions and ideas as if our awareness 
of present and past and fancied objects could be detached 
from the mental activities which respond to them. And 
we had to speak of the inner activities as if they were 
isolated in consciousness and separated from the ideas. 
But the most unnatural frontier line which we had to draw 
and which we did not cross was that which separates both 
ideas and activities from the inner states. The simplest 
impression may blend with our state of satisfaction or dis- 
satisfaction ; the simplest memory with our state of enjoy- 
ment or regret ; and an abundance of emotions and senti- 
ments may surround our ideas. At the same time our inner 
states decide our actions. Our enthusiasm and our anger, 
our grief and our joy, control our attention, our thought, 
our involuntary and voluntary acting. Our moods and pas- 
sions, our intellectual and moral inner settings, are re- 
sponsible for the steps which we take. Our inner states 
thus mediate between the world of ideas and the world of 
inner action; even our indifference is a state upon which 
our inner behavior depends. We must now characterize 
this central section of our inner life, which has so far 
profited least from the scientific methods of modern psy- 
chology. 

The most elementary inner state which we can find in 

196 



INNEE STATES 197 

consciousness is the simple feeling of pleasantness or un- 
pleasantness which is attached to simple sensations. But 
from the beginning we must not forget that the organic 
pain or lust is just as much a sensation as white and black 
or sweet andi bitter. The pain sensations are always un- 
pleasant, the lust sensations always pleasant, but they 
themselves are neither unpleasantness nor pleasantness. "We 
can observe the state of discomfort produced by a foul smell 
sensation just as much as that caused by a toothache. The 
ache in the tooth is a part of our perception as well as the 
sensation of the odor. It makes no difference that its 
source, the tooth, is in our body, while the source of the 
smell is without. Both are objects of experience, while the 
displeasure in both is a subjective state. 

If the subjective character of the feelings is emphasized, 
that does not mean that they are capricious and beyond 
scientific foresight. The inner states of our self are con- 
trolled by laws as exact as those of the sensations. It is 
true "rtie actual feelings are to a high degree subject to per- 
sonal conditions, to chance habits and passing influences. 
The same taste sensation may be very pleasant to a hungry 
man, and very unpleasant to him when he has eaten too 
much. But this may also be said of the objective sensa- 
tions. The colored light impression depends upon the 
fatigue of the retina, upon the preceding experience of 
other light impressions and upon similar conditions in the 
perceiving individual. On the other hand, we may expect 
the same regularities in the appearance of a pleasant or an 
unpleasant feeling which we know in the sphere of sensa- 
tions. There are personal idiosyncrasies by which certain 
tastes, for instance, are disagreeable to some, while pleasant 
to most others, but these are personal exceptions like the 
seeing of the colorblind. 

Normally we can foresee that a slight bitter taste will 
be pleasant and an intense bitter taste unpleasant, that a 
tickling impression will be agreeable and a nerve injury 



198 PSYCHOLOGY 

extremely disagreeable, that a cool impression will be pleas- 
ant and a very cold one unpleasant, that a relief from thirst 
sensation will be agreeable and a sensation of nausea dis- 
agreeable. Moreover, we can trace exact relations between 
the quality and intensity of the stimulus and the character 
of the feeling. Each taste sensation, for instance, begins 
with a very mild pleasure, ascends to strong pleasure, sinks 
to a state in which pleasure and displeasure seem mixed, 
and with still greater intensity becomes decidedly unpleas- 
ant. But while this phase of pleasantness covers a large 
part of the scale in the sweet impression, it corresponds to 
a very small part of the scale in the sour impression, which 
with increasing intensity sinks very quickly to the unpleas- 
ant. Moreover, the character of the feeling depends 
upon the duration, upon the spatial extension, upon the 
alteration, and most of all upon the combination of the 
stimuli. 

This law-abiding regularity of the feelings appears only 
natural as soon as we consider the function of the inner 
states from our biological point of view. The pleasantness 
or unpleasantness leads to the most significant reactions of 
the individual. It represents the needs of the organism. If 
these needs changed from individual to individual and from 
minute to minute, it would indeed be impossible to foresee 
which feeling effects would arise. But the fundamental 
human needs remain to a high degree constant. Certain 
temperatures are helpful and others are harmful, certain 
odors are characteristic of wholesome food and others of 
poisonous or unclean, infectious substances; moderate ex- 
citement of the muscles is stimulating to the organism, 
painfully fatiguing overexcitement is injurious. The more 
closely related to the physical and chemical conditions of 
life the stimuli are, the more constant are their feeling 
effects. 

The Physiological Basis of Simple Feelings. — What is 
the underlying physiological process of this simplest feel- 



INKER STATES 199 

ing state? AYhat is added in our psychophysical system 
to the process of a slight bitter excitement and of a strong 
bitter excitement, when one appears pleasant and the other 
unpleasant? We have a definite basis for a physiological 
theory if we observe the bodily reactions connected 
with the sensory pleasure and displeasure. They indicate 
clearly the antagonism of the feelings themselves. If the 
stimulus is pleasant, the movements tend to make it go on ; 
if it is unpleasant, the movements tend to stop it. The 
stimulus continues, if we actively approach it or if we 
passively yield to it, and it ends if we move away or throw 
it off. Two groups of antagonistic movements are evi- 
dently especially characteristic. If the stimulus is disa- 
greeable, the organism reacts by a contraction of the flexor 
muscles. It is a cramplike shrinking of the body, a tense 
strain. If the impression is agreeable, the organism ex- 
pands, and the extensor muscles are active. 

It is the same opposition of movements which can be 
traced throughout the history of animal life. "We saw how 
the amoeba contracts under the influence of the dangerous 
stimulus, and expands under the influence of helpful 
stimuli. If the infant is put into a lukewarm' bath, we see 
these same useful expansions, and if he is held in a bath 
too cold or too hot, we see that general contraction. 
Throughout life the approaching and the withdrawing 
movements are the leading reactions to pleasant and un- 
pleasant stimuli, and under natural conditions the flexor 
and extensor contractions are their chief factors. Many 
other secondary centrifugal effects can be traced. The 
agreeable and the disagreeable states produce opposing 
reactions in the respiration, in the rapidity and character 
of the pulse, in the size of the small blood-vessels, in the 
gland activity, but whatever their biological importance 
may be, those contractions of approach and withdrawal 
must stand in the center as they alone have immediate 
practical bearing. 



200 PSYCHOLOGY 

If every useful stimulus from the first experiences of the 
infant produces one set of movements, and every harmful stim- 
ulus an opposite set of movements, it is evident that the per- 
ception of the one must be always accompanied by one group 
of kinesthetic sensations and the other by an opposite group of 
kinesthetic sensations. An immediate association must arise, and 
the satisfactory stimulus must awake directly the reproduced 
movement sensations of approach, the disturbing stimulus the 
reproduced movement sensations of withdrawal or rejection. But 
if every helpful stimulus, from the first warm milk which pro- 
duces the sucking movement, is accompanied by certain kines- 
thetic sensations, would it not be the simplest interpretation to 
claim that the feeling of pleasantness is itself the associated 
reproduction of these approaching movements'? The feeling of 
unpleasantness would then be the reproduced sensation of the 
withdrawing movement. Our withdrawal or approach may be 
a real will act; in that case the kinesthetic sensations which 
arise indicate simply the action. But when the same move- 
ments result automatically, their kinesthetic sensations fuse with 
the perception of the stimulus and give to the impression the 
feeling value. 

Such a theory seems indeed in the best harmony with the ob- 
jective facts. And yet it can hardly be accepted as the whole 
story. It is on the same level with those theories of space and 
time perception a'nd attention which we discussed before. Those 
who claim that the space perception results from kinesthetic 
sensations of our eye movements and limb movements surely 
point to essential elements in the situation. Yet we recognized 
this phase as incomplete, and we insisted that these actual kines- 
thetic sensations, while they enter into space perception and 
attention, are after all .secondary elements only. We developed 
a space theory and an attention theory which sought the direc- 
tion value of space and the vividness value of attention not in 
the resulting movement sensations but in the central changes con- 
nected with the arousing of the movement impulse. The im- 
pression became vivid when the central excitement found the 
channels of motor discharge open; the impression became lo- 
calized when the central excitement was carried into a particular 
movement direction; and we should now say: the excitement he- 



INNER STATES 201 

comes pleasant or unpleasant, if it is starting a movement of 
approach or withdrawal. 

As long as we feel bound to the traditional association theory, 
any reference to the characteristic actions would necessarily be a 
reference to the kinesthetic sensations. But as soon as we eman- 
cipate ourselves from the onesidedness of the association theory, 
we may indeed expect that the centrifugal processes themselves 
will alter the central excitements. In the association theory we 
can reckon only with a host of cells each of which has its special 
psychical sensation as accompaniment. In the action theory 
eveiy cell can itself pass through many changes of its inner 
excitement through its various outgoing responses. Eveiy sen- 
sation indeed needs reference to a special cell, because only in 
this way can we explain the associative interplay of the repro- 
duced sensations. We can understand how one cell excites an- 
other cell through associative paths of least resistance, Avhile 
we could never understand why the same cell should go from one 
stage to another stage through its own activity. But the pleasant- 
ness or unpleasantness is not such an independent element 
which enters on its own account into the associative mechanism. 
The feeling can disappear without the disappearance of the sen- 
sation, but if the sensation ends, its feeling tone is somehow 
destroyed. We must believe, therefore, that the primary proc- 
ess upon which the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the sen- 
sations depends is really a part of the sensoi-y excitement itself. 

Yet we have no right to neglect those seeondaiy factors, 
the reproduced kinesthetic sensations. We recognized their im- 
portance in space perception and attention too. They furnish us 
a true experience factor in our consciousness of direction and 
localization and make us aware of our inner activity in atten- 
tion. They are surely the resounding elements in our feeling 
tones, too. The pleasantness and unpleasantness receive their very 
color from our consciousness of the action through which the 
stimulus is continued or is discontinued. 

The Manifoldness of Feelings. — We have spoken of 
pleasure and displeasure only. In recent times it is a 
favorite topic of discussion whether we really have the 
right to confine the feelings which are attached to the sen- 



202 PSYCHOLOGY 

sations to these two. It has been claimed that a single tone 
or color may be accompanied by a feeling of tension or 
relief, or by restlessness or repose, or by excitement or de- 
pression, all of which may be combined with pleasure or 
displeasure, or may be entirely free from either. We 
should have accordingly a manifoldness of feeling tones. 
Others hold that all these effects are not true feelings, but 
simply additional organic sensations by which the pleas- 
ure and displeasure may be shaded. Another deviation 
from the orthodox theory is given when the pleasure and 
displeasure themselves are not acknowledged as uniform 
states. It is indeed often claimed that each kind of stimuli 
brings its particular kind of pleasure or displeasure. The 
satisfaction in a taste and in a sound are not the same 
state. Thus we might have an unlimited number of pleas- 
ure and displeasure qualities. 

These points of discussion appear in a new light as soon 
as the relation of the inner states to "^.he motor impulses and 
psychomotor settings is considered. If our feeling of dis- 
pleasure and pleasure really depends upon the motor ex- 
citements for outer actions the central processes must be 
shaded in innumerable ways. Both the centrifugal inner- 
vation and the central association of kinesthetic elements 
must be different when we fixate a color or when we listen 
to a sound or when we approach a source of odor, when we 
reject something bitter on our tongue or something hot in 
our hand. Moreover, this theory explains not only the 
manifoldness of pleasures and displeasures, but also justi- 
fies the claim that other inner states are to be characterized 
as true feelings, too. No doubt those who claim that the 
feelings of excitement or relief or repose or restlessness 
are characterized by organic and kinesthetic sensations are 
perfectly right, but that is no argument against grouping 
them with pleasure and displeasure, as we saw that kines- 
thetic sensations are a part of them, too. If the pleasant 
and unpleasant states depend not only upon these organic 



INNER STATES 203 

sensations, but still more upon the motor impulses them- 
selves, the same may be expected of those other states. 

The restlessness or excitement which shades the feeling 
tone of an impression may well be understood as the ac- 
companiment of central cell changes which result from the 
release of excited or restless motor impulses. We can 
have, therefore, just as many kinds of feeling states as we 
have ways of reacting, and yet it is not by chance that we 
always return to pleasure and displeasure as the funda- 
mental feelings. The reactions which make the stimulus 
continue or discontinue are practically so much more sig- 
nificant than all the others that their corresponding feeling 
tones must be acknowledged as predominant. Moreover, 
this central fact that the impulse leads toward the continu- 
ation or the discontinuation of the stimulus must be felt as 
more important than the varieties of special movements by 
which this result is secured. It is therefore only natural 
that we usually speak of pleasure and displeasure feelings 
in general and ignore the fact that they appear as a thou- 
sand different pleasures and displeasures according to the 
thousandfold forms of reaction. 

Emotions. — The motor theory helps us also to find 
the transition from simple feelings to emotions. In 
the complex emotional states the intimate relation to the 
centrifugal processes is so evident that no description of 
emotion can leave out the actions of muscles, blood-vessels 
and glands and their conscious effects. Anger and joy, fear 
and hope, enthusiasm and discouragement, delight and dis- 
gust, gaiety and depression, are marked by characteristic 
actions or inhibitions of actions, by tensions and relaxa- 
tions, by centrifugal effects like crying and perspiring, 
blushing and growing pale, trembling and laughing. These 
are the complex responses to complex situations, but in 
principle are not different from the simple reactions to the 
simple sensations. The explanation of the actual inner ex- 
perience must therefore move along the same lines. 



204 . PSYCHOLOGY 

Fear and anger are not complete in themselves before 
the unnatural breathing and the quick heartbeat and the 
trembling and the cramping set in. But the influence of 
these centrifugal parts can be and probably must be in- 
terpreted again in both ways. First we become conscious 
of the sensory effects of such bodily reactions. We cannot 
grit our teeth and clench our fist and frown and breathe 
deeply without perceiving these changes in our kinesthetic 
and organic sensations. But secondarily the central im- 
pulses to these contractions or to the gland activities cannot 
start in the brain cells without changing the setting of 
those sensory centers from which they were stimulated. 
"We see a snake and run away. The running gives us sen- 
sations without which the emotion would not be complete. 
But the more essential part is that the impression of the 
creature is frightful in itself. The transition of the sen- 
sory excitement into the vehement impulse to run must 
have produced an intracellular change in the excitement 
itself. 

It would be very onesided, however, to consider the in- 
fluence of the reactions, even in this expanded form of the 
theory as the only characteristic traits of the emotions. 
Both the ideas from which the emotion starts and the re- 
actions through which it develops control the play of as- 
sociations. A rush of ideas overflooding consciousness or 
a complete inhibition of associations or the predominance 
of associations with special feeling tone, may shade the 
emotional state. Exactly the same movements, therefore, 
may enter into very different emotions, and yet produce 
contrasting effects on account of the different ideas which 
are combined with them. We may run forward as a part 
of our fear of an explosion behind us, and we may make 
the same forward movement in an enthusiastic run for the 
ball. The consciousness of the forward movement is in the 
one case accompanied by the idea that the distance be- 
tween us and the danger is becoming greater with every 



INNER STATES 205 

step, in the other case by the idea that the distance be- 
tween us and the desired object is becoming steadily less. 
It is a characteristic combination of ideas and psychomotor 
results which gives the richness to our emotions. 

Their biological value is not always clear, and it would 
be artificial to seek actual advantage for the individual in 
every emotional excitement. The theorists often take refuge 
in the hypothesis that some groups of these organic re- 
sponses and the corresponding inner states are the late 
survivals of animal behavior or at least of the useful habits 
of primitive people. More frequently we probably have to 
count with the simple overflow of excitement which is in 
itself not adapted to any purpose. But the typical emo- 
tion is still to-day decidedly useful. The emotion secures 
for the action what the attention secures for the ideas. It 
is a resetting of the psychophysical system by which the 
mind is focused on one point. Our attention brings one 
idea to fullest relief and inhibits all the antagonistic ideas 
and suppresses everything which leads away from the at- 
tended center. The emotion likewise makes all the re- 
sources of the individual serviceable to one end. Every 
other impulse to action, every diverting desire and idea of 
any end becomes inhibited, nothing any longer interferes 
with the one chief impulse. The enthusiasm is not checked 
by cool reasoning, the desire to attack is not restrained by 
ideas of danger, the joy is not embittered by thoughts of 
drudgery. But not only the creative emotions have this 
biological significance. Fear is not less important for 
man's welfare; it is the great protective agency, and if it 
were not sufficiently developed to focus the mind on this 
one response reckless ideas and chance interests would lead 
us aside and would endanger us. 

The phj^siological basis of the emotions is accordingly a 
complex connection of nerve centers by which a normally 
useful reenforcement of reactions is secured. The special 
actions which are needed for this effect are produced with- 



206 PSYCHOLOGY 

out our conscious guidance. To a large degree they occur 
in organs which are entirely outside our voluntary control. 
"We cannot influence voluntarily our glands or our blood- 
vessels, and yet their functions are evidently almost as 
important for the total work of the organism in the emo- 
tional resetting as the reenforcements and inhibitions of 
the voluntary activities. The enthusiastic reenforcement 
of the deed demands the increased blood supply. The most 
subtle mechanisms for the regulation of the blood circula- 
tion enter into action in every emotional state. If we wish 
to emphasize the fact that all these responses are useful, 
while their useful end is not known to the excited indi- 
vidual, we can call the whole resetting instinctive. But we 
must not forget that this is in no way an exceptional priv- 
ilege of the emotions: every mental function, we saw, is 
based on mechanisms which are biologically useful. 

The subtle mechanisms by which the emotional reenforce- 
ment of the useful attitudes and actions is secured are 
little known as yet. Recent researches both by psychia- 
trists and physiologists point to the great importance of 
the chemical substances which the ductless glands of the 
body pour into the blood. Physiological experiments have 
shown, for instance, that when a cat is frightened or en- 
raged by a barking dog, adrenalin, the product of the 
small glands attached to the kidneys, appears almost im- 
mediately in the blood. The effect of adrenalin in the cir- 
culation is the contraction of certain blood-vessels and the 
dilation of others. In the abdominal organs the blood- 
vessels are contracted and the blood is forced from these 
vegetative organs of the interior to the limbs and to the 
heart, lungs and brain. In a situation in which a strong 
aggressive or escaping movement is needed the adrenalin 
production of the body thus regulates the blood supply 
in the most useful manner. The muscles of the limbs which 
are needed for the attack or the escape are well supplied, 
and brain, lungs and heart are prepared for the extraor- 



INNER STATES 207 

dinary effort, while all the other inner organs by lack of 
blood are forced for the time to decrease their vegetative 
functions. This change in the blood circulation, then, be- 
comes the cause of many secondary expressions of rage 
or of fear. 

AYe have hardly the right to say that the emotion is the 
cause of the adrenalin production, inasmuch as these effects 
of the adrenalin must be acknowledged as essential parts 
of the emotion. On the other hand, the mere perception 
of the irritating or frightful object cannot possibly stimu- 
late the activity of the adrenal gland, if there is no pre- 
ceding impulse to attack or to escape. Hence we should 
say that the barking dog arouses in the cat first the motor 
impulse to a strong reaction movement of aggression or 
of flight, and that this excessive motor impulse works on 
the lower nerve centers as a stimulus for adrenalin secre- 
tion. A few seconds later the gland has done its work, 
has thrown its product into the blood circulation, and 
through the chemical influences of this substance on the 
nerves the true emotional process is released in the service 
of the intended action. Every true emotion probably be- 
gins with such a characteristic motor reaction which arouses 
gland activities through which the whole organism becomes 
reset and usefully prepared for maximum efficiency. Of 
course, this motor reaction may be a negative one, as, for 
instance, in the case of depression. 

The Esthetic Attitude. — The inner states which we 
have characterized so far arise on the background of prac- 
tical attitude. Yet the perceptions, memories, ideas, may 
enter our mind and find us prepared for entirely different 
kinds of responses, because the whole psychophysical sys- 
tem may be set in a different attitude. The most complete 
contrast to the practical is the esthetic attitude. In the 
esthetic setting also we respond to the world by complex 
reactions and corresponding to them we pass through rich 
esthetic feelings. But they have no reference to our prac- 



208 PSYCHOLOGY 

tical actions. The esthetic attitude is one in which we do 
not change the world, and in which no external effects are 
to be reached. The stormy sea arouses our fear if we are 
in the practical setting, but we enjoy the beauty of its 
waves if we take the esthetic attitude. In our fear of the 
sea we escape ; in our joy we do not want anything changed. 
Our practical life demands a general setting of the brain 
centers by which impressions or associations become im- 
pulses to actual movements. The characteristic prepara- 
tion for the esthetic emotion is a general setting of the 
brain centers by which every external response is inhibited. 
"We do not grasp for the painted fruit; we do not rush to 
assist the hero on the stage. 

This inhibition of actual responses does not involve a 
real lack of the normal motor impulses. But the contrac- 
tions are held in check by antagonistic impulses, or by an 
inhibition of the lower centers for response. The impulse 
to move and to act is felt internally, only it is detached 
from the idea of our own practical personality, as our in- 
hibiting of the movement impulses has eliminated the idea 
of our self. The centrally awakened feeling of action as- 
sociates itself, therefore, not with our behavior, hut with 
the impressions which nature or art offers to us. "We feel 
our movement impulse as the upward movement of the 
column which supports the roof. Every line and every 
curve and every angle in the building becomes a center of 
activities, every form and every color in the picture is now 
enlivened by the excitements and impulses which arise in 
lis, every tone in the melody reaches out for other tones 
and longs for them, the rhythm of the poem and its rhymes 
are felt with the energies which are ours, and every branch 
in the landscape before us now has a life of its own. We 
associate our reactions with the elements in the landscape 
or in the work of art, because we have detached them from 
ourselves through our antipractical, esthetic setting. 

Nature or art is beautiful when all these energies har- 



INNER STATES 209 

monize, when the excitement of the one color does not 
interfere with that of another, when the forms support one 
another, when the rhythms agree, when the tones find one 
another. But as these energies are our own, it is ultimately 
the psychological harmony and unity of our own responses 
through which we become aware of the unity of the beauti- 
ful thing. It is the task of the artist to create his work 
so that the energies which he stimulates are in such psycho- 
physical harmonj^ He must therefore choose such tones, 
for instance, as fuse, or paint his canvas so that the forms 
in the picture balance, or write his poem so that the ideas 
aroused by the words harmonize with the rhythm of the 
verse. He can produce these energies only if he really suc- 
ceeds in suppressing the practical attitude. For this pur- 
pose he must detach his work from the interests of life and 
move the mind away from the world of practical experi- 
ence. The frame must cut off the painting from our real 
surroundings and the flat canvas must show that the fig- 
ures in it are not real men. Where art simply imitates 
life, the esthetic attitude is impossible. The unnatural 
white marble statue, not the lifelike, colored wax fig- 
ure, creates the esthetic setting of the psychophysical 
system. 

The detailed analysis of the esthetic process may turn in 
both directions; we may examine the conditions which re- 
enforce the esthetic attitude, and we may study the com- 
binations of elements which are in harmony with it. The 
experimental study has been especially devoted to this lat- 
ter question. We shall trace this esthetic work of the psy- 
chological laboratory when we turn to applied psychology. 

The Intellectual Attitude. — The esthetic attitude, and 
accordingly the inner state in esthetic experience, is to a 
certain degree similar to the intellectual attitude, as both 
seem equally detached from practical actions. The thinker 
concentrates his mind on a problem in the service of truth 
and submits to the truth without reference to his personal 



210 PSYCHOLOGY 

liking or disliking. He takes an objective attitude toward 
the facts and knows that he would fall into error or un- 
truth if his thought were guided by his personal wishes. 
This means that the central impulses to associations and 
reactions, which are controlled by personal desires, are 
inhibited in the process of truth-seeking as much as in the 
process of esthetic apprehension. 

But the ways must part here. In our enjoyment of 
beauty the detachment from actual life and the correspond- 
ing inhibition of practical action is the fundamental and 
final event. In our seeking the truth in every act of the 
intellect this inhibition of interfering actions is provisional 
and is in force only until the thought process is completed. 
As soon as the thought result is reached it must become the 
starting point for action. When we traced the process of 
thought as an inner activity, we recognized that it is just 
this end state which gives to the thought movement its 
character and energy. We do not act as long as we are 
thinking, but we think only in order to act. The securing 
of a new foothold for action is the real goal. We reorgan- 
ize our perceptions and ideas in order to reach it, and 
the anticipation of the final action is the psychophysical at- 
titude which controls the reorganizing process throughout. 
In every ordinary act of intelligence this fundamental 
connection hetween the thought process and the new adjust- 
ment to the life situation is quite evident. In the case of 
the theoretical scholar this connection becomes less obvious, 
because the thought processes have reached such complexity 
that they appear as independent transactions. But this 
is, after all, only a division of labor. The intellect takes 
the world as a connected whole. And this points to another 
contrasting aspect of truth and beauty. The beautiful ob- 
ject is attended to in its isolation; it stands alone cut off 
from the world. The object of intellectual work is never 
interesting in itself alone, but only in its connections. We 
link cause and effects, we compare the present case with 



INNER STATES 211 

previous ones, and every true thought is a contribution to 
the one interconnected system of knowledge. 

The intellectual attitude is thus only on its surface simi- 
lar to the esthetic one. In its deeper structure it is the 
opposite. But the essential point is that it, too, involves a 
complex preparatory setting. This may be stimulated by 
the immediate wish to act on the basis of tlie intellectual 
result or by the mere desire for more knowledge. It is the 
setting by which only such combinations of ideas can be- 
come effective and only such acts of affirmation can arise as 
are in agreement with the totality of the knowledge at our 
disposal. 

This setting of the brain centers is represented in con- 
sciousness by the resulting ideas themselves and by the 
whole series of inner responses, but we are not directly 
aware of the reorganization of the brain paths. The fact 
that we are in the thinking attitude becomes known to us 
by the appearance of our thoughts. I have just seen a 
butterfly at the window: I might have taken toward it 
the practical attitude of catching it for my friend's col- 
lection. I might have taken the esthetic attitude and sim- 
ply enjoyed the beauty of its colored wings. But I evi- 
dently have taken the intellectual attitude, as I find that 
thoughts about the class to which it belongs and about the 
structure of its nervous system and about its reactions 
actually come into my mind in seeing its movements. 

Nevertheless a certain inner feeling of this attitude, a certain 
state of reflective setting arises in consciousness too. Kinesthetic 
sensations may be parts of its fringes ; yet it seems probable that 
here, too, we have to do with an influence of the changes in the 
centrifugal paths on the sensory centers. In any case we are 
somehow conscious of every variation in this setting for truth. 
Belief or disbelief, familiarity or strangeness, trust or distrust, 
doubt or certainty, interest in one line or another can shade our 
inner feeling of intellectual responsiveness. Each time we have 
e\ddently a preparedness for a different kind of reaction. Yet 



212 PSYCHOLOGY 

these shadings of the inner states fuse so completely with the 
ideas from which our action starts that the selfobserver has small 
>chance to isolate those elements and it is not surprising that in 
the experimental analysis the introspection finds very few traces 
of such inner states of thought, and is confined essentially to 
the various stages of the final thought process. It only indicates 
that the sensations play a very subordinate role in our inner 
states and that the fundamental character of inner states lies 
in the resetting of the brain processes for response and their 
retroactive influence on the sensory centers. We can abstract here 
from the inner states of the moral attitude, as this refers to the 
relation of man to man, and belongs in the compass of social 
psychology. 



CHAPTER XV 
PERSONALITY 

The Unity of the Personality. — We studied the ele- 
mentary processes of sensory stimulation, of reproduction 
and association, of reaction and inhibition, which underlie 
the complex processes of life. Then we turned to these 
complex processes themselves and analyzed the perceptions, 
the ideas, the inner activities and the inner states. But 
these, too, are after all not independent contents of our 
consciousness. Introspection shows them bound together 
in every true experience of the personality. We cannot add 
any new content, when we finally consider this personality 
itself; we can only speak of that perfect interplay of per- 
ceptions, memories, fancies and symbols with the feelings, 
emotions, acts of attention, of thought and of will. 

We recognized that the causal interconnection of all 
these functions is made possible by the complete connec- 
tion of the brain parts. No element of personal life is 
without such physiological foundation. The physiologists, 
including those who prefer to call themselves objective psy- 
chologists or behaviorists, have therefore no difficulty in 
characterizing the behavior of the personality as such in 
purely material terms. They would say that the character 
of personality expresses itself in the reactions in so far as 
the responses of the muscles and glands and blood-vessels 
are not mere results of the stimuli which reach the senses 
but are controlled above all by the after-effects of all the 
earlier experiences^. These experiences, they would empha- 
size, contain not only the earlier sense excitements, but what 
is equally important, the earlier reactions and their cen- 

213 



214 PSYCHOLOGY 

tripetal effects. Every afferent and every efferent excite- 
ment, every physical or chemical change resulting from 
the repetitions of reactions, or from the forming of asso- 
ciation paths of lessened resistance, must count for the 
iinal effect of the personal deed. It is a trillionfold inter- 
play of facilitations and inhibitions in the connecting 
.structures with constant molecular resetting in the centers 
themselves. This resetting, moreover, must depend, as we 
have often insisted, not only upon those excitements which 
flow toward the cell body but no less upon those which 
leave it. 

To us the physical mechanism alone cannot be a substi- 
tute for the psychophysical system. The physical part, to 
l3e sure, is alone responsible for the causal connection, but 
the psychical part, that is, the psychophysical process in 
so far as it is open to selfobservation, remains the psychol- 
ogist's most immediate object of interest. The cell mech- 
anism furnishes the explanation, hut only the contents of 
consciousness cause us to seek such physiological explana- 
tions. As psychologists we had to start from the inner ex- 
periences, and only our postulate that we bring them into 
causal connections makes us link them with the machinery 
of the brain. This interest in the mental states guides us 
to the highest point where we can see the personality in 
its unity. Of course, this unity is then nothing but the 
interconnection of causally connected parts. We have 
no right to substitute a kind of teieological unity in which 
the subject knows himself as the same in every act, a unity 
which we shall find fundamental in purposive psychology. 
There we have to acknowledge in the personality a oneness 
which is incomparable with that of the objects of nature, 
but from the causal point of view the unity of man is not 
different from the unity of the tree where roots and 
branches and leaves are firmly interrelated. The states 
and activities of the individual are completely controlled 
by the ideas and perceptions, and themselves control the 



PERSONALITY 215 

ideas which are to arise and the perceptions which are to 
be admitted. This mutual interdependence is the essential 
feature, and the whole personality is active only where this 
psychophysical cooperation of all parts is normal and un- 
broken. 

One result stands out prominently from all which we 
have discussed : we cannot possibly understand the psychol- 
ogy of the personality by mere associative processes. The 
association theory, which works only with the sensations 
and their reproductions, seeks in the content of conscious- 
ness far more than any introspection shows, and yet is 
obliged to seek everything there, because it ignores the 
richest part of the process, that which is going on outside 
of consciousness. The advocates of the subconscious recog- 
nized this weakness and insisted that only a small frac- 
tion of the life of the personality lies in consciousness and 
that the larger part is below the level of consciousness. 
There the subconscious ideas and reminiscences, wishes 
and habits, emotions and volitions are incessantly at work 
and decide on the conscious thoughts and activities. We 
saw from the start that such a theory of the subconscious 
is a poor makeshift, contradictory in itself, and unfit to 
render the aid for which it is constructed. But its nega- 
tive claim is certainly correct. The few contents which 
enter into consciousness itself are never sufficient through 
their associative play to explain what really happens in 
the personality. An answer which we give to a question 
may contain a most momentous decision in which all the 
principles of our personality express themselves, and yet 
it may find words before any ideas or arguments have 
really entered our consciousness. Our conscious associa- 
tions are often only the loose appendages to the actual 
events. 

When the theory of associationism has been recognized 
as entirely insufficient, and the theory of a subconscious 
causal mechanism has been rejected for good reasons, one 



216 PSYCHOLOGY 

group of thinkers, especially the philosophically inclined 
ones, tends to turn toward a purposive theory. A higher 
subject which through its own independent decisions has 
an automatic power over our inner life becomes a con- 
venient deus ex machina. But this, of course, is only 
a falling back to the theory of the purposive soul which 
must be discussed later. Here we cannot escape the demand 
to have a real system of causes and effects and no mirac- 
ulous intrusions into the causal interplay can help us. 

We know that only a physiological mechanism can fur- 
nish such an explanation, and the failure to explain all 
by the psychophysics of merely associative processes dis- 
courages us no longer. We have recognized that asso- 
ciationism leaves out the most important part of the 
physiological process, namely the complex setting of the 
cell connections and the resulting reorganizations of the 
cell mechanisms themselves. In our action theory these 
physiological psychomotor processes stood in the fore- 
ground. They appeared not only responsible for the devel- 
opment of the actual processes, but fundamental also for 
the shading of the sensorial and ideational states them- 
selves. Only in this way does the personality become a 
true unity in all its parts. Motor functions are now not 
only externally attached to the ideational ones, but are 
themselves the causes for the vividness of the ideas. The 
personality's thinking is as much the product of his actions 
as his actions are the product of his thought. 

Selfconsciousness. — The mere conscious existence of 
the ideas, feelings and actions which constitute a person- 
ality is in itself not the consciousness of personality. The 
idea of one's own self must be superadded, and this self- 
consciousness may take various forms. The infant has 
impressions and feelings and impulses too, and is early 
guided by preceding experiences. He has accordingly 
from the standpoint of the psychologist the traits of a 
personality; yet the infant has not selfconsciousness. The 



PEKSONALITY 217 

idea of his own personality has not entered his mind ; he 
is not conscious of the unity in his personal experiences. 
He plays with his feet just as he does with a rattle, and 
certainly does not experience his mental states as an inner 
possession. Selfconsciousness is a later product, which 
is surely not gained by the mere possession of conscious 
experiences. 

What are we really conscious of in our selfconscious- 
ness? We know ourselves. A philosopher might add: 
we do not know anything but ourselves, because what- 
ever we perceive in the world and whatever we remember 
is, after all, our own perception and our own memory 
idea. We see the houses and trees, but that means we 
have visual sensations and these we have in ourselves: 
they are a part of ourselves. Such an argument may be 
perfectly sound from a philosophical standpoint, but this 
standpoint is evidently not that of ordinary life, and we 
must ask first what knowing ourselves means in the ex- 
perience of the day. If we start from our practical 
experience, we know ourselves as one of the innumerable 
objects of which we are conscious. We know the table 
and the chair, the dog and the cat, our neighbor and 
ourselves. This knowledge of ourselves began psycholog- 
ically just like that of other things in the world. We per- 
ceived ourselves, that is, we perceived our own body by 
groups of sensations. 

In the world of objects which we perceive, that one 
object, our own person, gains an incomparable role. It 
cannot be otherwise. First, it takes the central place. This 
body of ours is present in every scene which we perceive. 
Whatever the setting of our impressions may be, in every 
room and in every street, we are present. But the child 
recognizes the importance of his body no less by his feel- 
ing sensations and by his actions. If anything too hot, 
too cold, too hard, too pointed, touches the skin, the re- 
sulting pain emphasizes the prominence of the body. At 



218 PSYCHOLOGY 

the same time the actions of the body carry out the desires. 
The desired ends are automatically realized by the move- 
ments of the arms or of the lips. The child's body thus 
becomes central in his conscious life, and this the more 
as in the experience of this one object visual, tactual, kines- 
thetic and organic sensations flow together in abundance. 

If this is the first stage, the second may be marked by 
the consciousness of identity in successive periods. The in- 
dividual knows himself as the same in every new ex- 
perience. We have to exclude any purposive meaning of 
this selfidentity. In the sphere of causal psychology it 
is simply a question of memory. The child awakes in the 
morning and knows that he is the same boy he was the 
night before, because he remembers all of yesterday's 
experiences. This ability to reproduce our earlier ex- 
periences, and to make use of the earlier acquired knowl- 
edge, links our whole life subjectively. Only through our 
memory does our selfconsciousness become complete. 

Yet from here it can develop to its still higher stages, 
which are reached by reflection. The individual reacts 
toward the outer world which is common to all, but 
the selection of the outer world toward which he may 
react depends upon his personality. He sees objects from 
his window, and other people from their standpoint see 
what he did not see. The perception of the thing is, ac- 
cordingly, dependent upon the bodily personality. This 
leads finally to the theory that all these perceived and re- 
membered objects are somehow in the bodily personality 
itself, besides being outside in the world of space and time. 
Then they are grouped together with the feelings and 
emotions and volitions in man and form the content of con- 
sciousness which selfobservation and ultimately scientific 
psychology may analyze. Selfconsciousness at this stage 
has reached a view according to which each one of us 
knows a world of objects, stars and chairs and the rest 
of the universe, and among these objects, we find our- 



PEESONALITY 219 

selves, our bodily personality, and in this bodily person- 
ality we find once more the chairs and the stars as our 
contents of consciousness, dependent upon our body, in 
particular upon our brain. 

From here the idea of the personality can still be dif- 
ferentiated in many directions. As soon as this content 
of consciousness is considered as something existing in 
the body, it can be contrasted with the hody and can be 
treated as the only real part of the personality. The body 
is then outside of the personality^ ; the mind is the man, and 
the body belongs to external nature. "We do not lose a 
part of our personality when our hair is cut or a tooth is 
extracted, nor even when arms or legs are amputated. But 
if the mind is the real personality a further elimination 
is unavoidable. We do not lose a part of our personality 
when the Latin vocabulary which we learned is forgotten 
and lost to our mind. Nor do any chance memory con- 
tents make up our personal self. We find our true self in 
the central functions of the mind, in its attention and 
will. The abstractions of the thinker lead from here to 
speculative constructions, and all these products of subtle 
reflection are paralleled by the vague ideas concerning the 
self in the cruder thoughts of the masses. 

But at the same time we demand an enlargement of 
the personality idea. The body is that central agency 
which acts and which cannot be affected without a feel- 
ing of response. But if that is the essential aspect, the 
personality is not inclosed by the epidermis. All. our 
social attachments, our name and our clothes, our house 
and in a certain sense our relations to our family and our 
friends, belong to us in this enlarged sense. Our influence 
acts for the realization of our wishes like our hands and 
lips. Our personality is the individual with his whole 
social setting in his vocation, in his country, and this en- 
larged idea of personality in no way interferes with that 
concentrated one in which man is only his will. 



220 PSYCHOLOGY 

All these concentric circles, all these wider or narrower 
groups of conscious experiences which we call our per- 
sonality, are found in our consciousness. We find there 
the impressions from our body, we find there the feel- 
ings, the volitions, the memories, the ideas of social re- 
lations, in short everything which constitutes that em- 
pirical personality. The question remains only: who is 
the one who finds them? Who is the spectator who 
watches this unified person? Is he himself a personality? 
But we practically answered this question when we decided 
at the threshold of causal psychology to treat mental states 
as describable, that is, as objects. An object cannot be 
known without a subject which becomes aware of it. The 
psychologist who demands an objective treatment of inner 
life must therefore consider all the mental experiences as 
contents of mind, and must contrast them with the sub- 
ject which becomes conscious of these contents. This sub- 
ject is the consciousness. But it would be an entirely un- 
justified and improper personification, if we were to give 
any personality character to this subject. 

It is not a discovery, but a necessary postulate of the causal 
psychologist, that every variation in the mental life be a variation 
in the objects of awareness, not in the subject. All our discus- 
sions have been controlled by this postulate without which causal 
psychology would be impossible. Accordingly the subject can- 
not perform any action. Its only function is to be aware, that 
is, to be conscious. This detaching of the function of aware- 
ness from the objects of which the subject becomes aware does 
not set up a real independent individual. Consciousness is ulti- 
mately in these constructions of the scientist nothing but a logi- 
cally necessary point of reference. The mental objects have no 
existence, if they are not conceived as objects for some subject, 
and therefore the fact that they are conscious objects is simply 
expressed in another form, if we say that they are objects given 
to a consciousness. The subject, the consciousness, cannot in- 
fluence these contents and cannot do anything with reference 
to them; it is only passively aware of them. The so-called self- 



PERSONALITY 221 

consciousness is therefore not an act by wliieli consciousness 
knows itself. If consciousness, as subject of awareness, is the 
knower, the self which is known by it is something entirely dif- 
ferent; it is that central, unified content of consciousness which 
is influenced by the world and reacts on the world. 

The Variations of the Personality. — Every change of 
the personality must then be a change in the con- 
tents of consciousness and in the brain paths, but not 
in the subject which is conscious of these contents. 
This content is indeed varying with every new experience 
which becomes a new incentive for action or a new mo- 
tive for inhibition, new material for knowledge or new 
ability. The personality develops steadily. On the other 
hand, by lack of training or by old age or by diseases it 
may decay. Certain fundamental traits, however, the type 
of reaction, the tendencies to feelings, the trained atten- 
tion, the rhythm of response, the energy of inner activity, 
may remain the same through all changing influences of 
the surroundings. The temperament, the character, the 
intelligence of the personality may last through any change 
of life conditions. Moreover, the principle which led us 
to the action theory holds here too. There is no in- 
fluence of the outer world which is not dependent upon 
the dispositions for reaction. An individual of a par- 
ticular temperament and character and intelligence and 
talent does not stand in an independent outer world which 
shapes him, but the outer world which has a chance to 
influence him is itself the product of his tendencies to re- 
action. Personality and the world are in a complete mu- 
tual relation. It is a closed circle. Each man lives m 
the W07'ld which his inner dispositions select and shape. 
The same surroundings are different for every personality. 

We are not only changing by new acquisition or loss, 
but, to a certain degree, each of us is a different per- 
sonality in different situations. If the essential feature 
of our personality lies in the system of our memories, we 



222 PSYCHOLOGY 

cannot deny that we are many persons in the same body. 
We feel ourselves as slightly different personalities when 
we are in the midst of our family or when we are at work 
in our vocation, when we are traveling in foreign lands or 
when we are living in our home garden, when we are at 
a political rally or at a thrilling theater performance, at 
a solemn function or in a gay company. Different asso- 
ciations and impulses characterize everyone of such situa- 
tions. The memories which filled the one are entirely in- 
hibited in the other. To be sure, we are able at any mo- 
ment voluntarily to awake the memory of the other situa- 
tion. "We can think of ourselves as professional workers 
while we are thrilled by a drama on the stage, and in the 
midst of our office work we can think of ourselves as the 
same who traveled in the world. But this continuity of 
selfconsciousness is then indeed a mere function of memory. 

If by some brain disturbance this memory function has 
become defective, the bridges from one such personality 
experience to another may be broken. The individual 
is now one personality, and the next day another, and 
on the third day he may have a full memory of the first 
but not of the second, and on the fourth day a memory 
of the second but not of the first and third day. The 
patient may build up through such associative memory 
connections two very different personalities and even three 
personalities may live and ignore one another in the same 
organism. Such cases of multiple personality have not 
seldom been observed. They show a real splitting of the 
psychophysical system. They are of deep interest for the 
theoretical study of personality. Only we must exclude 
the misleading popular view that such a double person- 
ality is composed of the normal self and a subconscious 
self which is ordinarily repressed but which comes to 
the foreground under abnormal conditions. 

Yet in outlining the motives which lead to the develop- 
ment of selfconsciousness, we have not yet spoken of one 



PEESONALITY 223 

which is essential. The idea of ourselves does not develop 
without the consciousness of other personalities. The in- 
fant discriminates between the persons and the things. 
The mere things hardly change and can be used, and do 
not start anything, while the parents and the nurse are 
active and surprising. The child's idea of personality 
begins as much with the watching of other individuals 
as with the feeling of his own self. It indicates that 
we move in abstractions as long as we disregard the in- 
dividual's relation to other individuals. As soon as we 
consider them we have stepped over the threshold of 
social psychologj^ It was artificial to look on the elemen- 
tary psychophysical processes as if they occurred in isola- 
tion. We had to proceed from them to the complex mental 
states which the individual finds in his selfobservation. 
We saw then that it was no less unnatural to treat them 
as independent mental states. We recognized that they are 
all combined in the unity of the personality. But now 
we must acknowledge that it is, after all, no less artificial 
to consider the individual personality as such an inde- 
pendent mental structure. We never know it in such 
isolation. The individual is himself an element of the 
social group and social organization, dependent upon his 
relations to other individuals. 



PAET III. THE SOCIAL GROUP 

A. ELEMENTARY GROUP PROCESSES 

CHAPTER XVI 

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 

The Aim of Social Psychology. — If the psychologist 
tries to describe and to explain all the mental phenomena 
he cannot disregard those which result from the coopera- 
tion of several individuals. The social group may be as 
small as a family or as large as the concert of civilized 
nations. It may be as fugitive as the chance meeting of 
two strangers one of whom asks a question and the other 
replies, or as stable as a life partnership in marriage. It 
may be held together by social or professional, economic 
or political interests. It may embrace people in the same 
room who see and hear one another; it may be formed 
by individuals scattered over the world, who know one an- 
other by work or reputation. It may be an involuntary 
relationship like that of the members of a crowd in a 
panic, or a definitely regulated combination on the basis of 
statutes and contracts, programs and platforms. 

Whatever the form of the social group may be, new 
mental functions arise from the mutual influence of its 
members. We have no phenomenon of social psychology 
before us, if two or a million persons are performing 
the same act, perhaps perceiving the moon, without being 
influenced by one another. The interest of the social 
psychologist begins only where they enter into actual rela- 
tions : the individual experiences mental states which would 

224 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFEEENCES 225 

not enter his consciousness without the existence of other 
men. The simplest gesture or imitation as well as the most 
complex act controlled, by custom or fashion or by law, 
involves such consciousness of the social ^roup. The 
psychologist must trace both the mental contents which re- 
sult and the psychophysical processes which ^ead. to them. 
Every process in society in which the minds of several in- 
dividuals cooperate thus becomes proper material for 
psychological analysis. 

On the surface these psychological efforts seem to co- 
incide with those of the sociologists. The science of so- 
ciology can be interpreted in many ways, and the differ- 
ences of definitions point to a real variety of tasks. Some 
students of sociology consider it their goal to describe and 
to explain every life function of society. Others claim 
that this would make all the social sciences, including eco- 
nomics and politics and history only parts of sociology. 
They want to concentrate the interest of the sociologists 
on the particular question of how society is formed and 
how this combination and cooperation of men have de- 
veloped. But whatever the wider or narrower view of 
the sociological problems may be, they are characteristically 
different from the interest of the social psychologist. For 
the sociologist the starting point is the group itself. Its 
structure, its life, its achievement, are studied, and the 
mental functions which enter are only means for the ex- 
planation of the group development. For the social 
psychologist these mental functions are the real objects. 
He cannot start, therefore, from the group as such, but 
must always begin with the individuals. The state or the 
family, the party or the crowd, the club or the race, has 
no selfobserving consciousness of its own. The psychologi- 
cal experience of the group goes on in the individual mem- 
bers who stand in contact with one another. Social psy- 
chology is therefore the greatest help for sociology, but it 
remains an independent science. 



226 PSYCHOLOGY 

On the other hand, the social psychologist who starts 
from the processes in the individual personalities must 
finally advance from these members of society to their 
unified organization. He has a full right from his psycho- 
logical standpoint also to speak of the mind of the nation 
or of the mob or of the family. He does not refer by 
that to a mystical higher personality which exists some- 
where above the individuals. He forms such a conception 
in analogy with the cooperation of the cells in the brain. 
Millions of neurons cooperate in every brain. Each such 
neuron has its centripetal, its central and its centrifugal 
part, and each may have its elementary psychical accom- 
paniment. Any number of them may work together in a 
group, and all together form the personality. In this way 
every person has its centripetal, its central and its cen- 
trifugal part, and its functioning is accompanied by mental 
states, and any number of such persons may cooperate, too, 
in groups, and their totality forms the life of mankind. 
The whole psychophysical brain is as real as each of its 
cells: in this sense we may say that the whole social 
group is as real a psychophysical unit as any individual 
person. 

The study of social psychology shows so far a tendency 
through which its sphere becomes narrower than seems 
justified. Too often the idea prevails that the interest of 
the social psychologist properly lies only where the indi- 
viduals are parts of a general mass, but that it is out of 
place where single personalities are in the foreground and 
dominant. The processes of language, of customs, of 
faiths, in short all which the undifferentiated group pro- 
duces, are inclosed in the circle, while the productions into 
which individual statesmen or scientists or artists or re- 
ligious leaders enter with their personal originality are 
excluded from the analysis of social psychology. The chief 
illustrations are therefore taken from the life of the primi- 
tive peoples, because the social consciousness of the savages 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 227 

seems less differentiated, while the highly civilized life is 
clearly guided b}^ masterful individuals. But that is just 
as narrow as if we were to omit in individual psychology 
those states in which a particular idea or feeling or de- 
cision becomes prominent in consciousness. "\Te know that 
in the individual mind the attention usually focuses on 
one mental content, but this remains nevertheless in com- 
plete interplay with all the other elements of the mind. In 
the social consciousness of the group, too, the attention 
may be focused on a particular part ; on the intellectual or 
artistic or religious or political or industrial leader. But 
the mutual influence between him and his followers or his 
opponents lies entirely within the compass of social psychol- 
ogy. The highest development of the civilized nations is 
material for psychology as much as the vague, unshaded 
existence of the primitive races. 

Childhood and Maturity. — "Where individual psychol- 
ogy ends social psychology has to begin. The personality 
is the highest unit which is reached in the former : a com- 
bination of at least two personalities is the smallest unit 
which can be object for the latter. But before we may 
ask how personalities can influence one another and work 
together and experience mental states which they could not 
have by themselves, we must evidently consider how far 
the individuals differ from one another. No relation be- 
tween men can be fully characterized, if we disregard the 
personal variations. AYhen we studied the elementary 
processes in individual psychology, we began with the 
stimulations, because they furnish us the elements, the sen- 
sations. Only after knowing these manifold sensations 
could we proceed to the further elementary process, to 
the association. Before we ask how individuals associate, 
we must know, too, how they differ from one another. No 
two individuals are alike. If men were mentally alike, the 
social groups would have an entirely different character. 

Here we have to enumerate, of course, only those dif- 



228 PSYCHOLOGY 

f erences which have significance for the social organization 
and the resulting social mental states. We may classify 
them in four groups. The individuals who form the social 
world differ, first of all, in age. The age variations evi- 
dently form a class of their own on account of their neces- 
sarily passing character. The group which children and 
parents or pupils and teachers form is perfectly controlled 
by the mental characteristics of youth in contrast to the 
elders. The second class may embrace all the differences 
which are common to whole groups of individuals, for 
instance to all women as against men, or to all members of 
a race, or to all individuals of a special nation, to all mem- 
bers of a profession or of a vocation. The third class con- 
tains the individual differences in the narrower sense of 
the word, that is, the differences in which we cannot recog- 
nize the traits of a large group such as sex or race, but 
in which the individual really differs from his neighbor. 
Here belong the variations of temperament, of character, 
of intelligence, of talent and so on. Finally we may class 
together those individual variations which interfere with 
the normal harmony of mental life, the pathological mental 
states. 

"We have sometimes before had occasion to point to the 
mental life of the child. Every single psychical function 
which we analyzed in man can be traced backward to 
a definite period in the child's development, where it 
slowly began to be formed. Self consciousness and will 
and emotion and ideas and attention are not born with 
the infant, but slowly secured. Yet we have seen that 
the newborn child does start with a wonderful equipment 
of nerve connections which produce important, useful re- 
actions in response to the stimulation of the outer world. 
This reaction apparatus is in no way perfected by nature 
in the first days of life. New anatomical brain paths grow 
and become efficient during the child's development, but 
the reactions are from the start adjusted to the simple 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 229 

needs of the infant, and everything which follows is only 
growth and differentiation. 

Even the senses which are open to stimuli furnish at 
first scanty material. The child does not see colors during 
his first year; the optical impressions are only shades of 
gray and movements. The most significant difference, how- 
ever, is not the meagerness of sensation material, but the 
lack of connection. Every impression stands by itself on 
the background of vague organic sensations and feelings. 
It is one blurring content of consciousness without any 
inner organization. Slowly memory images begin to arise, 
and emotions shade the behavior. With the third year 
not only the memories but general ideas and complex af- 
fections are acquired. The learning of the language 
hastens the intellectual development; the indefatigable 
method of trying and trying again trains all the psycho- 
motor powers, and they in turn influence the intellectual 
differentiation and the emotional state. 

The compass of experiences is still small, the judgment 
untrained, but the child of five years has gained all the 
mental traits of the adult. Yet every function needs its 
further development. The voluntary attention is still very 
easily exhausted and lacks all perseverance ; the memory 
is still untrained and highly deceptive; the power of in- 
hibition very undeveloped ; the time sense and the number 
sense clumsy and crude ; the apperception controlled by 
superficial analogies. But every day brings progress, first 
of all through the child's own efforts, through his ex- 
ploring in the world and assimilating from the world men- 
tally that upon which he is ready to react. The stream of 
knowledge becomes broader and broader ; the motor train- 
ing becomes more differentiated ; the intellectual abilities 
become serviceable to tasks of increasing difficulty; and 
with the power of reading the mental surrounding is end- 
lessly enlarged. 

Yet the years of later childhood, of youth and adoles- 



230 PSYCHOLOGY 

cence are not merely an unfolding in which every func- 
tion becomes more efficient; they are at the came time a 
development with marked rhythms and with changes char- 
acteristic of definite periods, changes which may involve 
a decrease in the activity of certain mental functions as 
well as an increase in that of others. The play of the 
imagination is most vivid in childhood, as it is less checked 
by an objective memory. The impulsiveness of the child 
becomes repressed by the sober purposiveness of the adoles- 
cent ; the quickly growing interest in social relations must 
inhibit many a fully developed childish interest. The pre- 
dominant feature of the period of puberty is the rich devel- 
opment of high-pitched feelings and sentiments, often with 
quick changes and deep influences on the whole intel- 
lectual and active life. 

The time from the twentieth to the sixtieth year is 
the period in which the energies reach their full dif- 
ferentiation. The first half of this period may be char- 
acterized by the greatest elasticity which the individual 
can attain; the second half by the greatest maturity of 
judgment. But while the intellectual powers may continue 
to increase with experience, the feelings become duller, the 
motor impulses less energetic and the mental traits of old 
age begin to creep into the psychophysical behavior. The 
associative mechanism weakens, the spontaneity of the 
mind decreases, the senses suffer, the memory for recent 
impressions becomes defective, the mental life decays. The 
rhythm of this life history differs greatly with different 
individuals. Precocious children race through the stages 
of childhood; many vigorous men reach fourscore years 
without marked symptoms of decay. But these differences 
of individual rhythm belong together with those of talent 
or t^nperament. Here we have to deal with the average 
structure which allows a rather precise mental picture of 
the infant of two, or of the child of eight, or of the 
adolescent of sixteen, or of the old man of eighty. 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFEEEXCES 231 

Sex and Race. — If we are to trace the characteristic 
mental features of an individual, we may be greatly aided 
by knowing to which human groups he belongs. Without 
analyzing his mental physiognomy we popularly take it 
for granted that an Italian has different mental tendencies 
and dispositions from an Esquimaux, a fisherman from a 
scholar, a jockey from a minister. In short, the mere fact 
that a man belongs to an objective group, to a race, to a 
people, to a vocation, seems to allow the assumption that 
certain mental qualities are to be expected. In scientific 
thinking we have before us the problem of group psychol- 
ogy. Its specific question is how far certain traits are 
common to all members of an objective group. How far 
have all the Chinese something in common which makes 
them different from all the Japanese? How far have 
all the working men in factories, or all soldiers, or all 
mountain dwellers, common mental features ? It is evident 
that the groups which are analyzed in such a survey 
by no means embrace only individuals who are in actual 
contact with one another, or who have any mutual in- 
fluence. The mountain dwellers of the whole globe are 
without connections; those of South America do not come 
in contact with those of Asia. They form, accordingly, no 
social group in the sense of social psychology, but they 
do form a group in the sense of group psychology, as 
we can ask whether there is anything common to all of 
them. In the same way we may treat all epileptics or 
all violinists or all chess players or all people with brown 
eyes as groups whose common features may be studied. 
Wherever we have an objective trait which allows a definite 
grouping, it may be worth while to examine whether cer- 
tain mental features are correlated with it. 

Of course such a correlation will hardly ever be com- 
plete. We may find that one race is phlegmatic and an- 
other vivacious, but that certainly does not exclude their 
sometimes exchanging roles. If we have a large number 



232 PSYCHOLOGY 

of individuals, the average characteristic may be relied on. 
A whole crowd of Eussians will behave differently from a 
crowd of Spaniards or from a crowd of Englishmen, but 
the individual Englishman may show traits which we are 
accustomed to expect from a Spaniard or a Russian. A 
man of affairs may have the artistic temperament of a 
musician, and a musician may have the practical mental 
trend of a captain of industry. There are men who have 
a female trend of mind, and women with strikingly male 
mental features. That an individual belongs to a certain 
group, therefore, does not mean that he is invested with 
all the average features of the group. But this does not 
negate the value of psychological group analysis. 

The two largest groups which may be contrasted are 
those of male and of female individuals. Careful experi- 
ments have thrown light on the differences of memory, at- 
tention, feeling and other mental functions in boys and 
girls and in mature men and women. Such experimental 
results can easily be supplemented by social, statistical ma- 
terial, by historical reports and the account of male and 
female achievements in civilization. The psychologist cer- 
tainly cannot point to any one mental function which is 
present in all men and absent in all women, or vice versa. 
It cannot even be said that either sex possesses a charac- 
teristic trait in which some members of the other sex may 
not excel too. Yet such studies leave no doubt that sig- 
nificant differences exist. It would be superficial to claim 
that the mind of man or of woman is superior, but each 
has its peculiar points of strength and weakness. The 
survey of a large field shows first of all that men vary 
more strongly. Women are nearer to the average type. 
The extreme variations above and below the average occur 
more frequently with men. They show the greatest de- 
velopment of intellectual, emotional and volitional powers 
in the case of scientific or artistic or political or religious 
genius and the greatest criminal depravity. The average 



. INDIVIDUAL DIFFEEENCES 233 

female mind is patient, loyal, reliable, economic, skillful, 
full of sympathy and full of imagination ; on the other 
hand it is capricious, oversuggestible, often inclined to ex- 
aggeration, disinclined to abstract thought, unfit for 
mathematical reasoning, impulsive, overemotional. The 
good and bad features alike can be understood as the re- 
sults of a more emotional temperament in women than in 
men, and secondarily as the results of greater activity. But 
the chief point is that in men the various contents of con- 
sciousness remain separate, while in the mind of women 
they fuse. Her life, therefore, has more inner unity, and 
she shows more readiness to devote all mental energies 
to one idea. But for the same reason she must be in- 
fluenced by prejudices, must show a lack of logical dis- 
crimination, must be under the control of the present im- 
pressions and too little directed by the arguments which 
reason and memory supply. 

The mental traits of the different races and peoples are 
much discussed in ethnological studies, but have as yet 
been very little examined by the methods of scientific 
psychology. Those mental functions which can most easily 
be submitted to experimental investigation, the elementary 
functions of perception, attention, memory, and feeling 
show rather insignificant differences. The visual sensations 
or the reaction times or the memory span are the same 
for an American and a German and a Russian. The real 
variations appear only in the more complex functions 
which are less accessible to mass experiments. Hence the 
material of ethnological psychology still lacks experi- 
mental exactitude. It is taken partly from a general ob- 
servation of the peoples and their life and partly from a 
psychological interpretation of their objective achieve- 
ments in the world of civilization. The manifoldness of 
traits becomes truly psychological material as soon as the 
particular forms of behavior and of achievement are recog- 
nized as the expressions of simple mental functions. 



234 PSYCHOLOGY 

It has been pointed out, for instance, that in Europe 
there must be a fundamental racial difference between 
the Greco-Latins and the Teutons. The Greeks, Romans, 
Italians, Spaniards, are talkative, quick and vivacious in 
their actions, while the Germans, English, Dutch, Scandi- 
navians, are taciturn and deliberative. The Greek temples 
are simple ; the northern cathedrals complex. In music the 
Latin nations love the single melody in its clearness and 
simplicity; the Teutonic nations the complexity of coun- 
terpoint : in literature the unity of action in Greek or classic 
French drama contrasts with the complexity and wealth of 
Shakespeare or Goethe : in painting the simplicity of 
Italian art is strikingly different from the manifoldness 
of the Dutch. But the same contrast appears in the in- 
tellectual and emotional, in the political and practical life. 
The southern peoples are children of the moment : the 
Teutonic live in the things which lie beyond the world, 
in the infinite and the ineffable. Even in the popular 
games the Greeks confined themselves to the simple con- 
tests like running and jumping and throwing the discus, 
while the Teutons prefer the complicated cricket and foot- 
ball. In short, the Greco-Latin civilization tends toward 
clearness and simplicity; the Teutonic toward complexity 
which is based either on a greater number of factors or on 
a greater irregularity in their combination. If it is 
brought to its ultimate psychological expression, the 
Greco-Latin is absorbed by what the perception offers, 
and his attention inhibits the onrushing associations; the 
Teutonic mind divides its attention and always has room 
for suggested side issues. A social group into which a 
large number of Italians or Frenchmen enter must there- 
fore have mental features sharply different from those of a 
social combination in which Englishmen or Germans pre- 
vail. 

Much psychological attention has been devoted to the 
primitive races, and recent ethnological expeditions have 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 235 

not seldom been accompanied by psychologists who carried 
their reaction time instruments and attention apparatus to 
the South Sea Islands. Yet the results indicate a very 
thorough similarity of all human beings, as far as the most 
elementary functions are concerned. The popular idea, for 
instance, that the senses of the savages are sharper than 
those of civilized men can be disproved by exact experi- 
ment. If certain tribes are able to recognize objects at 
distances at which civilized men do not notice anything, 
it is essentially through training of the attention for the 
observation of small signs, a training which is forced on 
them by the conditions of their life. The true mental 
differences between the primitive and the civilized peoples 
appear in the more complex functions. Sociologists are 
inclined to insist that the power of attention in primitive 
man, the power of inhibiting impulses and the power of 
original thought are weaker than in the higher races. But 
these impressions are too often gained by studying the 
mind's work through tests which do not belong to the 
natural course of primitive life. If the standpoint of the 
primitive man himself is really taken, these mental powers, 
in particular the power of inhibiting impulses, frequently 
seem remarkable. 

Character and Temperament. — As soon as we turn to 
groups of vocational character, the situation shows new 
features. In our highly differentiated social life the mental 
traits of different professional groups seem even more dis- 
tinct than those of different racial elements. In America 
a hundred lawyers, a hundred actors, a hundred school 
teachers, a hundred storekeepers and a hundred ministers 
would show in the group average stronger difference of men- 
tal behavior than the average of equally large groups of 
Anglo-Americans, Swedish-Americans, German-Americans 
and Scotch- Americans. But those racial groups are formed 
by birth, the vocational groups by free selection, and this 
selection is evidently itself a mental process. If we ask 



236 PSYCHOLOGY 

for the mental traits of the actors as against the ministers, 
we contrast two groups which are originally characterized 
not hy the external performance on the stage and in the 
pulpit, but by the internal desire for theatrical life or for 
church life. These desires are mental functions and the 
real problem is then: what are the other mental traits 
which usually accompany these desires? The problem of 
group psychology is then replaced by the other problem: 
how far do various mental traits hang together ? But if we 
raise this question, we must ask first how far mental traits 
vary from individual to individual. 

We must now consider the most prolific source of in- 
dividual differences, the personality as the product of its in- 
herited dispositions. In any group, in any race or com- 
munity or vocation, we find psychical differences from per- 
son to person, just as in spite of racial anthropological 
traits even in the same city no two faces look exactly 
alike.' Individuals may vary in their emotional disposi- 
tions or in their tendencies to action or in their ability 
for mental readjustment or in their fitness for particular 
achievements : the differences of temperament, of character, 
of intelligence and of talent. But these marked variations 
to which we are accustomed to give our chief attention 
in practical life are surrounded by innumerable differ- 
ences of perception, memory, imagination, attention, feel- 
ing and volition. We frequently had to point to such dif- 
ferent shadings before. We spoke of the visual, acoustical 
and kinesthetic type of reproduction and of similar mental 
variations. 

The individual traits are to a certain degree the results 
of life history. They have developed through the ex- 
periences in childhood, through the training of abilities, 
through the acquiring of associative material, through the 
awaking of desires and interests in the formative period 
of the mind. But no training and no external influence 
can entirely supersede the inborn tendencies. They are 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 237 

the product of inheritance. Not only unusual talents like 
the musical or mathematical or linguistic powers can be 
traced through family histories, but the subtlest shades 
of temperament, character and intelligence can often be 
recognized as an ancestral gift. Statistical studies which 
covered many characteristic opposites like industrious and 
lazy, emotional and cool, resolute and undecided, gay and 
depressed, fickle and constant, cautious and reckless, bril- 
liant and stupid, independent and imitative, loquacious 
and silent, greedy and lavish, egoistic and altruistic, and 
so on, have indicated clearly the influence of inheritance on 
every such mental trait. The inheritance from father to 
son and from mother to daughter is thirty to forty 
per cent, more frequent than the crossed inheritance from 
father to daughter or from mother to son. But the in- 
fluence of the mother on the mental traits of the children 
is about ten per cent, stronger than that from the father. 
The probability that intellectual qualities will be inherited 
in the second generation is greatest, next the moral qual- 
ities and after them those of temperament. 

The varieties of temperament have always been noticed. 
The old division into the melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric 
and sanguine persons drew its names from a long for- 
gotten medical theory, but it refers to types of emotional 
life which can still be contrasted to-day. The sanguine 
and the phlegmatic are inclined to superficial emotions and 
their superficiality makes both somewhat optimistic, but 
while the sanguine person experiences the emotions in 
quick rhythm, the phlegmatic passes slowly through the 
changes of feeling. The choleric and the melancholic are 
subject to strong emotions, on the whole, with a pessimistic 
tendency, but with the difference that the choleric has the 
quick, vivid, almost stormy emotions, the melancholic the 
slow, lasting excitements and depressions. But while these 
four groups of dispositions only are usually called tem- 
peraments, we can easily discriminate other lasting ten- 



238 PSYCHOLOGY 

dencies in affective life. The contrast of frivolous and 
of morose, of courageous and of timid, of passionate and 
of apathetic dispositions do not coincide exactly with any 
temperament. 

The disposition to will action, the diaracter, varies espe- 
cially in its strength. The power to keep the selected mo- 
tive dominant can grow to a heroic force against which no 
fear and no temptation can prevail to change the psycho- 
motor setting, and it can sink down to the attitude of 
the weakling whose will decisions are outbalanced by any 
new chance proposition or by any passing fancy. But the 
powerful character can serve egoistic as well as altruistic 
ends ; thus the mere strength is no pledge of morality. The 
morality, the frankness, the loyalty, the reliability of char- 
acter and their opposites are hardly elementary disposi- 
tions, but combinations of will and emotion. 

Still richer are the differences of imaghiation, even if we 
abstract from those varieties of sensorial reproduction 
which make one man's imagination work in pictures and 
another's in tones, one in words and one in movements. 
The fundamental differences of imagination lie in the 
power to organize the associative material under the con- 
trol of subjective feelings and wishes. This difference be- 
tween poor and rich imagination may be divided further 
by the individual tendency to yield passively to the play 
of ideas or to control them actively in the service of a 
plan, however much this plan may be condensed in the 
mind into a mere emotional excitement. The artistic imag- 
ination is of this active type. 

Intelligence. — By intelligence we meant the ability to 
adjust the mental setting to a new situation. No teacher 
who knows the class has any difficulty in grading the 
pupils according to their intelligence. Such ranking would 
not correspond to the total intellectual achievement of the 
pupils, as the intelligent one may be lazy and care- 
less and the rather stupid may overcome his defect in the 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 239 

school class by industry and effort. The intelligent may 
even be hampered by a poor memory and the less intelli- 
gent helped by an excellent memory, and yet independent 
of these secondary aids to intellectual work the poor intelli- 
gence remains easily recognizable. No one's intelligence 
can serve equally well in all departments of intellectual 
culture. Disposition and training makes one more able 
to show his intelligence in pure reasoning and quick ad- 
justment to abstract judgments, while another may prove 
it in rapid adaptation to complex practical conditions. 
One may more quickly turn to superordinated ideas and 
another to subordinated ones, one may be more inventive, 
another more speculative. 

In the psychological laboratories methods have been 
developed not only to study all such variations by long 
research, but to determine them quickly by standardized 
test experiments. It is not difficult to find out the quality 
of an individual's memory for numbers or words or colors 
or faces or tones or whether his attention has a wide or 
a narrow span, whether it is steady or fluctuating, whether 
the associations are controlled more by recency or by fre- 
quency or by vividness, whether they are slow or quick, 
whether they are chiefly coordinated or subordinated, and 
so on without end. But from such simple tests the analysis 
may proceed to more complex experimental questions by 
which the temperament, to a certain degree the character, 
the tendency to emotion, and above all the variations of 
intelligence can be traced. The experiment creates minia- 
ture situations in which the individual has to perform 
his act and this can be compared with average achieve- 
ments under the same conditions. 

We may test the intelligence by measuring the time 
needed to recognize certain wrong conclusions as illogical, 
or to fill out certain blanks in a sentence, or to make a 
sentence out of certain given words or a word out of given 
letters or to solve an elementary technical problem such as 



240 PSYCHOLOGY 

the opening of a box with a complex system of fastenings. 
This study of mental tests, which has almost grown into 
a science by itself, plays its most significant role in the 
service of practical achievement. Such tests are needed to 
determine for what function in life a man is best equipped, 
or how far the testimony of a witness in court is reliable, 
or what defects of mental life can be found in a patient, 
or what degree of intelligence can be accredited 
to a pupil. In short, the problem of tests is so firmly 
connected with the work of applied psychology 
that it had better be left for our psychotechnical 
part. 

The test experiment leads also to the difficult question of 
how far variations in different mental functions are corre- 
lated. Is it true that a particular kind of memory goes 
with a particular kind of attention ? Does strong character 
coincide with high intelligence ? Is a rich imagination con- 
nected with a special temperament ? Is it true that mathe- 
matical and musical talent occur together? Does a good 
memory for figures accompany a good memory for forms? 
Practical life gives plenty of hints in such correlation 
problems, and the proficiency of the pupils in school in 
the various fields of knowledge offer rich material for 
such comparative studies. But the chief supply of data 
must come again from the experiment. We may test the 
memory of a hundred men by measuring the number of 
seconds necessary to learn certain figures or words; the 
rapidity of reaction by measuring in thousandths of a 
second the response to an optical stimulus; the power 
of discrimination by measuring the just perceivable differ- 
ences of pitch, of color and of weight; the attention by 
measuring the number of e's and r's which can be crossed 
out on a printed page in five minutes; and so on. For 
each of these tests we may rank our hundred subjects ac- 
cording to their achievement, and then study how far the 
order corresponds. With exact formula we can deduce 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 241 

from such results how far proficiency in one task cor- 
responds to proficiency in another. 

But here too the practical interest prevails. AVe want 
to foresee through the study of such correlations what we 
may expect from an individual who shows a particular 
trait. In the interest of practical purposes we want to pre- 
dict whether he possesses certain other traits too. The 
central theoretical fact is, that such a correlation does not 
exist between mental functions which have no common ele- 
ment or no common cause. The degree of correlation sim- 
ply indicates the relation between those conditions which 
the two functions have in common and those which they 
have not in common. This whole science of correlation 
throws a new interesting light on the inexhaustible mani- 
foldness of human individuality and emphasizes anew how 
different the individuals are who enter into the social 
groups. 

Abnormal Variations. — The individual differences of 
man are not completely characterized, unless the varia- 
tions are also considered by which the mental equilibrium 
is disturbed: the abnormal variations. We have repeat- 
edly had to discuss the changes which disease may bring; 
we traced the losses of memory or the splitting of the 
j)ersonality and so on. One thing showed itself at every 
point : the mental disease does not introduce psychological 
elements or functions which are different from those of 
normal life. Every pathological variation consists of the 
same psychophysical processes which we know from ordi- 
nary behavior. What is changed is only the proportion 
of th e processes. Their harmony is disturbed ; we com- 
pared it with a caricature in which the normal relation of 
the features is distorted. The cartoon shows too much or 
too little of some bodily trait. In the distorted mental 
physiognomy there may be too much or too little of an 
emotion or of a volition or of an idea or of attention, too 
strong or too weak reactions or associations or inhibitions. 



242 PSYCHOLOGY 

This comparative interest in the pathological trait as a 
mere extreme variation of the normal is indeed essential 
for the theoretical psychologist, in contrast to the in- 
terests of the physician, who must look on those mental 
disturbances as symptoms of definite diseases. If we ap- 
proach in applied psychology the problems of psycho- 
therapy, this interest of the physician must be decisive. 
But here in the field of theoretical psychology we are not 
concerned with symptoms of diseases. "We have only men- 
tal variations any one of which may enter into many dis- 
eases, just as fever may be a symptom of many bodily dis- 
turbances. Above all, each of these pathological varia- 
tions appears to the psychologist in a continuous series 
which leads from the normal to the pathological without 
any sharp demarcation line. 

The extreme depression of the melancholic patient is 
then only an abnormally strong increase of a normal sad- 
ness, and the gaiety of the maniac an exaggeration of a 
normal hilarity. We know less intense fluctuations in the 
compass of normal life ; we know pessimists who are easily 
depressed, and silly persons who are often hilarious with- 
out reason. It is the same variation, but we call it normal, 
as long as the personality still retains its equilibrium: we 
call it abnormal, as soon as this balance of the mental func- 
tions becomes so disturbed by the exaggeration of the emo- 
tion that the ordinary life purposes cannot be fulfilled. 
The maniac who is so excited that he gives no attention 
to the outer world or the melancholic patient who in his 
brooding declines to eat, cannot survive in the struggle 
for existence. If the mental mechanism as a whole se- 
cures a checking of a too strong or a substitution for a 
too weak development, the personality may be unusual, 
eccentric, or somehow deficient, but not pathological. The 
philosopher may doubt the reality of the outer world, but 
his doubt is completely organized in his mental setting 
and in no way interferes with his practical attitudes to- 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 243 

ward the world. He is therefore normal, however much 
his ideas may differ from those of the average man. But 
the same doubt as the starting point for behavior which 
tries to ignore the perception of the outer world is self- 
destructive and must lead to the doors of the asylum. 

We may discriminate four large groups of mental dis- 
turbances with reference to four classes of psychophysical 
conditions. Large areas of brain neurons may be de- 
stroyed beyond repair and definitely eliminated from co- 
operation. The degeneration of extensive brain parts in 
general paresis is typical of such partial death of the 
psychophysical organ: mental life crumbles. In a second 
group the brain neurons are temporarily affected. They 
may be exhausted, poisoned, paralyzed for a period, but 
can recover; the partial loss of mental functions may be 
overcome. The cause of this passing injury is an auto- 
intoxication of the body. The special sources of these self- 
produced poisons are still little known, but it is certain 
that the normal working of the brain depends upon the 
presence of chemical substances in the blood which are 
supplied by ductless glands. If through a disease of these 
glands, or through any other disturbance in the metabolism 
of the body, necessary chemical elements are lacking or 
are too abundant, the brain passes through longer or 
shorter attacks of abnormal functioning. The periodic and 
alternating insanity, the manic depressive attacks, many 
delusional states, must probably be grouped in this class. 
As soon as the toxic disturbance is removed, the poisoning 
substances eliminated, the brain returns to its normal 
work. Quite similar is the third group in which the poison 
is introduced from without. Even a simple alcoholic 
elation is such a poisoning of the brain, which in its ex- 
treme form leads to delirium. Morphinism and cocainism 
are of the same order. 

Quite different from these three groups, and psycho- 
logically the most interesting, is the fourth group. It is no 



244 PSYCHOLOGY 

less based on abnormal changes in the physiological mech- 
anism, but the disturbance is not one by which particular 
neurons are destroyed or temporarily paralyzed. It is es- 
sentially one of abnormal connections in the central brain 
paths. The excitement irradiates into wrong neuron 
groups; the association process does not stir up the 
biologically useful centers. Misleading connections are 
formed. It is as if the wires were crossed, and a torturing 
disorder may result. This develops especially from emo- 
tional shocks, but may arise in any brain which has a 
disposition to neurasthenic or psychasthenic or hysteric 
states. The after-excitement of certain neuron groups 
forces the opening of association and reaction paths by 
which unfitting ideas, movements and gland activities are 
produced, and by which negatively the normal associa- 
tions and reactions are cut off. A general dissociation 
may arise in this way. Some complex after-effect of an 
earlier experience may get increasing control of the psycho- 
physical reactions and work as a foreign intrusion in the 
mind. The resulting phenomena are of bewildering mani- 
foldness, and it is often very difficult to discover the source 
of the obsessions, the unfounded emotions, the fears 
and anxieties, the onrushing movements and all the other 
erratic functions. 

It is this group of abnormal psychophysical processes 
which has most often suggested the interpretation by sub- 
conscious mental states. If this psychical terminology is 
used only in order to have a convenient means of descrip- 
tion, there is indeed no objection. It is easier to describe 
the after-effect of an earlier experience and of an emotional 
excitement as a subconscious memory with subconscious 
affections than to- characterize the after-process in terms 
of physiological neuron processes. For the practical pur- 
poses of the physician the account of the events as sub- 
conscious is almost unavoidable, but on the basis of theo- 
retical psychology, we have no right to surrender the prin- 



INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 245 

ciples upon which the possibility of psychology depends. 
AVe must translate the story of the subconscious mind into 
the language of brain physiology. 

Destroyed neurons, temporarily paralyzed neurons and 
wrongly connected neurons are responsible for those ex- 
treme variations of mental life in which the individual is 
partly unfit to enter into the cooperation of the social 
group. Many gradations between the entirely normal and 
the strictly pathological are possible; and so we find a 
dense population in that great borderland region between 
mental health and illness. The defects of temperament, 
character and intelligence may show millions of shades, 
down to the hopeless inefficiency of the imbecile and the 
idiot whose mind does not grow beyond the development 
of the child. The stupid, the clumsy, the inattentive, the 
forgetful, the weak, the morose, the intemperate, the 
vicious, the cruel, must be dragged down in the struggle 
for existence by their shortcomings in the intellectual, 
moral or practical equipment. Yet while their whole life 
trend may be deeply influenced by such a deficiency, the 
disastrous effect is the outcome of an elementary variation 
in the psychophysical system. The association paths do 
not conduct the excitement easily enough, or the motor 
settings are not firm enough to resist the opposite impulse, 
or the inhibitory mechanism is deficient, or the after-effects 
of previous stimuli too easily fade away, or the connections 
for cooperation of the brain parts and for irradiation are 
in poor working order. In every case the simple cause 
must produce its effect again and again, and the cumula- 
tion of the ill-adjusted responses ruins the social develop- 
ment of the personality. No one is born a criminal, but if 
his psychophysical equipment is inferior, the chances are 
great that the temptations of life will find him unprepared 
for the needed resistance. 



CHAPTER XVII 
UNION 

The Conditions of Organization. — ^^When we traced the 
elementary processes in the individual mind, we naturally 
began with the simplest contents, the sensations, and then 
asked how they are connected with one another by associa- 
tion and irradiation and how they suppress one another 
by inhibition, and how they become organized in complex 
groups. In studying the social mind we must follow the 
same course. Now we know the elements : the personalities 
with the whole manifoldness of their mental differences. 
Our next problem must be their association and inter- 
relation, their mutual reenforcement and inhibition and 
their organization in groups. We may class the elemen- 
tary processes involved under three headings : union, sub- 
mission and self assert ion. The elements in social groups 
must first enter into some mutual relation ; they must come 
nearer together and overcome their isolation. All the proc- 
esses which work toward this end may be classed under 
the general heading: union. 

But the social groups are not simply the aggregates by 
firmer or looser attraction. The organization of the group 
depends upon subordination and superordination, as well 
as mutual approach. In the individual consciousness the 
attended idea asserts itself, becomes emphasized, and be- 
comes the center of new associations, while the other men- 
tal states are inhibited, suppressed and deprived of their 
vividness: the individuals in the social consciousness may 
also be dominant or suppressed, may be aggressive or sub- 
missive. These inner relations toward other individuals 

246 



UNION 247 

may take any number of forms and the result is an end- 
less shading of the social groups. If the fundamental ten- 
dency of the relation is the selfsuppression of the per- 
sonality in the interest of others, we may call it submis- 
sion : the opposite tendency which leads to the suppression 
of others may be called selfassertion. In each of these 
three groups, union, submission and selfassertion, we 
have reactions from person to person which are combined 
in the complex processes of actual civilization. It was an 
abstraction when we spoke of any one of the elementary 
processes in the individual minds as if it existed by itself. 
In reality they all are intimately intertwined. In the 
social mind too the processes of union, subm^ission and self- 
assertion can be separated only by artificial demarcation 
lines, and even those are by no means rigid. The group- 
ing is only an effort to bring order into these interpersonal 
relations. Nothing but the barest outlines of the field can 
be drawn here. 

In turning to the social reactions, we are certainly not 
disloj^al to the biological theory which controlled our ex- 
planation of the individual functions. If the psycho- 
physical apparatus produces a biologically useful result in 
approaching the helpful and escaping the injurious parts 
of outer nature, it certainly serves no less significant in- 
terests when it brings man into organization and coopera- 
tion with his fellows. The individual secures advantages 
which he cannot gain in isolation, and in addition to these 
biological interests of the individual, the interests of the 
race as such are served by the creation and training of the 
progeny. Civilization certainly means something very dif- 
ferent from a mere biological development of the race, but 
there is nothing in it which cannot be completely brought 
under the biological point of view. Historical society finds 
its deepest interpretation only through purposive psychol- 
ogy, but no element in it is inaccessible to the explanation 
of social, causal psychology. We may consistently treat the 



248 PSYCHOLOGY 

individual who enters into the social group as a psycho- 
physical mechanism dependent upon biological conditions, 
and yet explain the most complex processes of social life. 

Voluntary and Involuntary Communication. — Our first 
survey is to select those functions by which the individuals 
are bound to one another. The starting point is the child 's 
recognition of personalities as different from the lifeless 
things in the surroundings. We emphasized, when we 
spoke of the development of the self, that the child builds 
up the idea of his own personality in steady correla- 
tion to the idea of those around him. The I and the 
you grow up together. The things of the surroundings 
are moved, while the parents and the nurse move them- 
selves. The things can be handled and do not change, 
while the persons resist or yield in an active way ; and this 
makes to the infant the greatest difference in his little 
world. It remains the greatest difference throughout life. 
Even this mutual influence of the idea of self and of 
neighbor does not disappear when infancy turns to child- 
hood, to adolescence and to maturity. It only becomes 
more ample and differentiated. The idea of our self re- 
mains a reflection of those with whom we are in contact. 

Almost at the threshold of life selfexpression becomes 
a means of communication. The infant not only cries to 
discharge his discomfort, but very soon also to call his 
mother. When the motor reaction of crying brings the 
adult to the cradle, a means of communication has been 
established, from which a steady development leads to the 
oration with which thirty years later the man may appeal 
to the mass meeting of voters. Yet this first budding in- 
tention of the infant to attract others is not the beginning 
of the mental social contact into which he enters. Before 
the child becomes aware of the effect of his expressions on 
others, his movements have been observed by his elders 
and have been understood by them as symptoms of inner 
feelings. The rhythm of his breathing, the tensions of 



UNION 249 

his face, have established a relation from mind to mind. 

We must discriminate, accordingly, two starting points 
for the social process, the involuntary muscular, vascular 
and glandular discharge of inner states, which can be no- 
ticed by others and understood as an expression of feelings, 
and on the other side the intentional movements produced 
for the purpose of drawing the attention of others and 
communicating to them something of the inner experi- 
ence. From both beginnings a steady development goes 
through the individual's life and while the two elements 
of social behavior are more and more intertwined, they 
can still be traced as two independent factors on the 
highest level of maturity. At every stage child and man 
express involuntarily their feelings and emotions. In cry- 
ing and laughing, in blushing and growing pale, in 
trembling and fainting, in movements of attention and dis- 
regard, of approach and escape, the inner excitements are 
shown to the social group. Even where the intention is 
the opposite, where the criminal tries to hide his guilty 
emotion, he may betray it by the unintentional expression 
of his fears. 

Largely beyond the control of intention, these expressive 
movements are preestablished by the inborn nervous con- 
nections ; not a few of them may result from a biologically 
useless overflow of energy or may be only survivals of re- 
actions which were helpful to the race at lower stages of 
animal development, or to man in more primitive periods. 
But while they have lost their immediate biological useful- 
ness, they have not lost their significance for social con- 
tact. The social group would be deprived of an essential 
tie, if men were only expressing what they intend to ex- 
press. Even when the stage of intentional language 
expression is reached the rhythm and choice of words says 
more than the speaker plans. Often the strongest sj^m- 
pathies and antipathies are stirred up by the involuntary 
expressions in speech and action. 



250 PSYCHOLOGY 

Language. — Speech itself develops essentially from the 
intentional expressions. They may take a manifold form 
before the movements of lips and vocal cords are assisting. 
The finger which points to the desired object secures a 
voluntary social contact. The complex sign language of 
the deaf mutes indicates how such expressive gestures may 
become the carriers of communication concerning a rich, 
mature life. The pointing gestures are supplemented by 
descriptive movements, and finally by symbolic movements. 
Among the southern peoples with their more vivid tem- 
perament this communication through gestures remains 
important by the side of the full-fledged language. But 
it is, after all, the production of the spoken language 
which binds the human individual most firmly to the social 
group and allows him to share the civilization of his place 
and time. 

The language of man is preceded in the animal world 
by the cries and calls, the tones and noises of the amphib- 
ians, the birds and the mammals. Their social effects of 
attracting the mates, of warning and deterring are promi- 
nent, although much of the beast's hunger cry or of the 
bird's song may be only an overflow of the inner affection 
without social aim. In the child the mere crying is from 
the middle of the second month supplemented by mean- 
ingless articulated sounds, which in the second year of 
life yield more and more to articulations with definite com- 
municative intentions. The sounds which the expiration, 
the contraction of the vocal cords and the tongue move- 
ments produce, become the signs for objects, based on the 
child's dawning understanding of words spoken to him 
and on the imitations, and at first meaningless repetitions 
of what he hears. The child does not invent words; he 
simply makes use of t*he involuntary sound expressions of 
inner states and proceeds by imitations. 

We should no longer be dealing with the elementary 
functions, if we were to consider the further complex de- 



UNION 251 

velopment of language in the individual ; and we should 
remove the discussion into the field of historical psychol- 
ogy, if we were to consider the psychological changes in the 
languages of the past. Here we need only point to this 
half involuntary, half voluntary system of reactions by 
which the psychophysical individuals are linked together. 
The production of sounds in the speaker corresponds to 
the understanding in the hearer. This understanding of 
the meaning is a process of association w^ith which we are 
familiar from the analj^sis of the individual mind. We 
recognized that its chief part consists not in the awaking 
of conscious memory images, but in the setting of the 
physiological interconnections. By this the sound of the 
word opens certain channels of discharge and closes others, 
facilitates the irradiation of excitement to certain associa- 
tions and inhibits other antagonists ; in short, creates a set- 
ting by which the further psychophysical process is deter- 
mined. 

The substitution of visible signs in written or printed 
form does not alter the fundamental character of the re- 
lation between mind and mind. It is a problem of in- 
dividual psychology to trace the steps by which we learn to 
connect visible signs with the spoken word and to link the 
meaning directly with the perception of the written or 
printed letters, or by which we acquire the ability to write 
under the immediate impulse of the idea of meaning. But 
the problem of social psychology, the intercommunication 
of minds by linking ideas with signs which can be per- 
ceived and understood is not changed through the substi- 
tution of writing or printing for mere speaking. On the 
other hand, the social group itself is by this process en- 
larged in space and time. Only the visible word can bind 
individuals separated by centuries and divided by oceans. 

Associations. — Gestures and speech create the formal 
conditions for the social connection, but other desires and 
impulses must draw men together. The mere ability to un- 



252 PSYCHOLOGY 

derstand one another does not involve the desire to form 
a group. Yet this longing for firmer contact is a deep- 
rooted instinct in every human mind. Man shares this 
gregarious desire with the higher animals. In its higher 
forms it finds a background in a consciousness of kinship 
which involves elements of thought, but instinctive be- 
havior in the higher animals makes them also seek the 
contact only with members of the same species. The de- 
sire for solitude is the artificial product of a refined so- 
ciety, a reaction against the animal impulse of the masses. 
Isolation is punishment not only because of the resulting 
ineffectiveness but through the lack of satisfaction of the 
craving for social contact. The complex technic of in- 
terchange emancipates civilized individuals from the herd- 
like personal contact. It secures the same satisfaction by 
an intellectual and emotional association of men with the 
help of the written or the printed word, the scientific or 
the artistic production, the social or the political achieve- 
ment. 

This clannishness which makes man long for men is con- 
centrated in the individualized desires for friends and 
reaches its highest tension in the focused love between 
man and woman. Friendship demands a more complete 
mutual understanding and agreement than the chance re- 
lation between any members of the tribe, while love, of 
course, intensifies the social instinct by the entirely differ- 
ent element of the sexual desire. Yet this, too, is a crav- 
ing for contact in which the strongest imaginable union 
of the personalities is passionately sought. The sensation 
of bodily contact directly felt or longingly anticipated be- 
comes the center of consciousness, controls the complete 
psychophysical setting, secures by its emotional resound- 
ing the dilation of blood-vessels and the activity of glands, 
and forces mind and body toward the contact with the 
loved individual. The immediate wish for contact between 
men may thus vary from the most superficial preference 



UNION 253 

for a mere being together with some one to a lifelong loyalty 
and an overwhelming desire for one individual. Loose and 
firm, large and small social groups must arise from this 
emotional, mutual attraction. 

But all these emotional and instinctive desires for social 
contact must be supported by the results of intellectual 
insight into the practical needs. The individual recog- 
nizes that he can protect himself best by combining with 
others. The aim may be defense or attack against com- 
mon enemies, or the provision of food or clothes or shel- 
ter: at every stage the practical achievement is dependent 
upon the cumulation and division of lahor. From the 
primitive hut life to the modern factory, technic de- 
mands many minds working to one end; and the masses 
of the party or of the army or of the whole nation re- 
quire a conscious cooperation, firmer than any mere de- 
sire could secure. But it is not work alone which makes 
comrades : play succeeds in it no less. The desire for play 
is in itself not necessarily social. The child may play in- 
defatigably with some noisy toy. It is nature's scheme to 
train the individual and to prepare him for the tasks of 
life by making him exert his psychophysical powers with 
joy. But the opportunities to make use of his intellect 
and of his emotions in a playful way cannot be realized 
more fully than in the game with equals. Hence the play- 
ing instinct also helps to attract individuals to one an- 
other in social groups, from the play of the nursery to 
the outdoor game and the dance of adolescence and ma- 
turity. 

Yet the manifoldness of social groups can never be ob- 
tained by a mere firm coordination of the individuals. An 
organization is needed which involves superordination and 
subordination. We must ask what mental states lead to 
this shading of the members of society. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
SUBMISSION 

Suggestion and Self assertion. — Whatever the psycho-, 
logical form of onesided or mutual approach may be, as 
soon as contact between individuals has been established, 
the chances are great that the resulting social group will be 
shaded by inequality. If one is giving and the other taking, 
one commanding and the other obeying, one leading and the 
other following, one teaching and the other learning, one 
helping and the other leaning on the help, one displaying 
himself and the other admiring, we have a mutual relation 
in which both parts are significant. Yet the mental proc- 
esses on the two sides are so different that we must separate 
the inner processes of the leaders from those of the fol- 
lowers. We begin with the attitude of subordination. We 
may consider as such states of submission all attitudes and 
settings by which the individual limits and narrows his 
own mental life, his own ideas and feelings and volitions 
under the influence of other individuals. The submission 
may be automatic or voluntary. 

The central feature of the selfeffacing process is a sub- 
mission of action. Its cleanest form is the yielding to sug- 
gestion. Of course, we all know a still more direct sur- 
rendering of our own will, namely, the accepting of advice 
based on logical arguments or on superior knowledge. If I 
wish to conserve my health, I act not as I personally m?y 
like to act, but as my physician advises me, and if I want 
to take a journey, I choose the train in accordance with 
the information which I receive. But if we subordinate 
ourselves knowingly to those better informed, the result 

254 



SUBMISSION 255 

does not depend upon a special social act ; it is an ordinary 
thought process and it is secondary that the motives which 
control our decision are received from other individuals. 
But if we come to the accepting of suggestions, this per- 
sonal relation from man to man becomes essential. It is 
truly a new characteristic process. Suggestion is often 
misunderstood, and the frequent popular discussions put 
the emphasis on wrong points. Suggestion is always a 
proposition to action. The proposed action may be ex- 
ternal or internal, a movement or an attitude. A sugges- 
tion never refers to a mere idea. If I simply arouse 
imaginative ideas in another man's mind, I do not suggest 
anything to him. If I ask a man to imagine a clove car- 
nation and its peculiar smell, my request may be suc- 
cessful in awaking his reproduced sensations, but that 
has nothing to do with suggestion. We have the other 
extreme before us, if I hypnotize a man and tell him that 
the pencil which I hand him is a clove carnation. If he 
enjoys its fragrance, it is a case of successful suggestion, 
not because the idea of the flower came up in his mind, 
but because he took it to be real. This acceptance of the 
imagined impression as reality is an inner activity, an at- 
titude, an inner deed. Not the idea but the belief in the 
idea is the product of the suggestion. 

Moreover what else is a belief but a preparation for 
action? I may think of an object without preparing my- 
self for any particular line of behavior. Here in the room 
I may think of rain or sunshine on the street as a mere 
idea. But to know that it now rains or shines involves a 
complete new setting in my present attitude, a setting by 
which I am prepared to take an umbrella or a straw hat 
when I leave the house. I may think of the door of this 
room as locked or unlocked without transcending the mere 
sphere of imagination, but to believe that it is the one 
or the other demands again a new setting in my motor 
adjustment. If it is locked, I know that I cannot leave 



256 PSYCHOLOGY 

the room without using the key. Every belief demands 
the preparation for a definite line of action and a new 
motor adjustment in the whole system by which the actions 
in future will be switched off at once into particular paths : 
and there is theoretically no difference whether my belief 
refers to the proposition that the door is open or that a 
God exists in heaven. But if every belief is such a new 
motor setting, then the whole question of suggestion is one 
of motor influence. 

Not every proposition to action or to belief can be called 
a suggestion. A mere request, "Please pass me the book 
on the table," or a mere communication, "It rains," may 
produce and will produce the proper motor response, the 
movement toward handing over the book, or opening the 
umbrella ; and yet there may be no suggestive element in- 
volved. We have a right to speak of suggestion only if 
resistance is to he broken down. If I say to the boy, 
* ' Hand me the book, ' ' when he is anxious to hide the book 
from my eyes, and the tone of my request overwhelms his 
own intention, then, to be sure, suggestion is at work. The 
stronger the resistance the greater the degree of suggestive 
power which is needed to overcome the primary motor 
setting. If I say to a normal man, "It rains," while he 
sees the blue sky and the dry street, his impression will be 
stronger than my suggestion. But if he is suggestible, and 
I tell him that it will rain, he may submit and take an 
umbrella on his walk, even if no outer indication makes 
a change of weather probable. 

Suggestion is certainly nothing abnormal and excep- 
tional, nothing which leads us away from our ordinary 
life. There is no human life into which suggestion does 
not enter in a hundred forms. Family life and education, 
law and business, public life and politics, art and religion, 
are dependent upon suggestion. In every field the indi- 
vidual submits to propositions for motor settings or actions 
which he would not perform, if he were only following 



SUBMISSION 257 

his own impulses or his reason. Daily experience shows 
us that different men have different degrees of suggestive 
power. Some men's arguments and propositions leave us 
indifferent. AYe understand their thoughts, and yet we 
remain accessible to opposite influences, while others make 
us ready to carry out their propositions, even if our first 
inclinations turn the other way. 

But still more important is the different degree of indi- 
vidual suggestibility, that is, of the readiness to accept sug- 
gestions. From the most credulous to the stubborn we 
have every shade of suggestibility, the one impressed by 
the suggestive power of any proposition which is brought 
to his mind, the other always inclined to dissent and to 
look over to the opposite argument. Such a stubborn mind 
may even develop a negative suggestibility. Whatever it 
receives awakens an instinctive impulse toward the oppo- 
site. Finally we are all suggestible in different degrees at 
different times and under various conditions. Emotions 
reenforce our readiness to accept suggestions; hope and 
fear, love and jealousy give to every proposed idea an ab- 
normal power to overwhelm the opposite idea, which other- 
wise might have influenced our deliberate action. Fatigue 
and intoxicants also greatly increase suggestibility. 

To point to the extreme form, it may be added that it is only 
an artificial increase of sug-gestibiUty which constitutes tha state 
of hypnotism. The hypnotic effect results onlj^ from the mental 
conditions of the subject and not from any special influence 
emanating from the mind of the hypnotizer or from any especial 
power flowing from brain to brain. Everything results from 
the change of equiUbrium in the psychomotor processes of the 
hypnotized, and thus upon the interplay of his own mental func- 
tions. All that is needed is a higher degree of suggestibiUty 
tlian is found in normal flfe. In such a more suggestible state 
even the direct sense impressions may be overwhelmed by the 
proposition for an untrue belief, and the strongest desires may 
yield to the new propositions for action. Whether I say, "You 



258 PSYCHOLOGY 

will not move your arm," or whether I say, "You cannot move 
your arm," awakening in the one case the impulse to the suppres- 
sion of the movement, in the other case the belief in the im- 
possibility of the movement, the arm remains stiff. If the 
subject is in the strongest hypnotic state, I may tell him that 
our friend has left the room: he will not see him, he will not 
even hear a word which the friend speaks. The direct sense 
impression of eye or ear is completely eliminated by the sug- 
gestion. 

The increased suggestibility is produced by slight visual or 
tactual stimuli, by monotonous sounds or by words which en- 
courage relaxation and sleep. The subject may stare at a 
shining button held in front of his forehead. But in any case 
it is the play of his own imagination which produces the sleep- 
like state. No one can be hypnotized for the first time against 
his own will. To expect strong hypnotic effect from a certain 
individual is often in itself sufficient to produce the sleep. Hence 
there is no special personal power necessary. Anybody can 
hypnotize, and almost with the same sweeping statement it may 
be said anybody, with the exception of young children or insane 
persons, may be hypnotized. Yet not everybody can be hypno- 
tized to the same degTee. The lowest stage of hypnotism is that 
breakdown of the resistance in which the subject can no longer 
open his eyes against the order of the hypnotist. Rather few 
can be brought to the point of accepting extended hallucina- 
tions or of yielding to the impulse to a dangerous action. 

The explanation of suggestion and at the same time of 
its exaggerated form, hypnotism, must evidently go back 
to those mechanisms w^hich we found at the bottom of in- 
hibition. Actions exclude one another because they are 
antagonistic. The suggestion simply helps one motor im- 
pulse to inhibit its antagonist. It opens the channels of 
action in the suggested direction. The results appear sur- 
prising only if we forget how endlessly complex the psycho- 
motor apparatus really is. If we disregard this complexity 
we may easily have the feeling that one person has an un- 
explainable influence over another. But as soon as we see 



SUBMISSION 259 

that every action is the result of thousands of psycho- 
motor impulses, which are in definite relation to antag- 
onistic energies, and that the result depends upon the 
struggling and balancing of these processes, we understand 
how small outer influences may help the one or the other 
side to victory. As soon as the balance turns to the one 
side, a completely new adjustment must set in. 

If an action is proposed for which no antagonistic im- 
pulse exists, the idea of the action leads to its realization 
without any element of suggestion. If the idea of the 
proposed action arouses an antagonistic impulse which is 
strong, the proposition will not be carried out. But if the 
individual is by nature suggestible or is brought into a 
state of increased suggestibility^ the antagonistic impulse 
will be powerless. We can define a suggestion as a proposi- 
tion to action which overcomes the aniagonistic impulses. 
To be suggestible thus means to be provided with a psycho- 
physical apparatus in which new propositions for actions 
readily close the channels for antagonistic activity. The 
suggestive influence of the individual consists in his power 
to arouse a state of suggestibility in other men by ap- 
pealing to their imagination or their emotion. A feeling 
of confidence, of respect, of admiration, but also of fear 
helps toward this result. The most complete submission 
must follow when a high degree of natural suggestibility 
on the one side coincides with a powerful suggestive in- 
fluence on the other side, especially in a situation which 
arouses emotional expectations such as hope or fear. 

Imitation and Sympathy. — The typical suggestion is 
given by words. But the impulse to act under the in- 
fluence of another person arises no less when the action is 
proposed in the more direct form of showing the action it- 
self. The submission then takes the form of imitation. 
This is the earliest type of subordination. It plaj^s a fun- 
damental role in the infant's life long before the suggestion 
through words can begin its influence. The infant imitates 



260 PSYCHOLOGY 

involuntarily as soon as connections between the move- 
ment impulses and the movement impressions have been 
formed. At first automatic reflexes produce all kinds of 
motions, and each movement awakes kinesthetic and muscle 
sensations. Through association these impressions become 
bound up with the motor impulses. As soon as the move- 
ments of other persons arouse similar visual sensations the 
kinesthetic sensations are associated and realize the cor- 
responding movement. Very soon the associative irradia- 
tion becomes more complex, and whole groups of emotional 
reactions are imitated. The child cries and laughs in 
imitation. 

Most important is the imitation of the speech move- 
ment. The sound awakes the impulse to produce the same 
vocal sound long before the meaning of the word is un- 
derstood. Imitation is thus the condition for the acquir- 
ing of speech, and later the condition for the learning of 
all other abilities. But while the imitation is at first simply 
automatic, it becomes more and more volitional. The child 
intends to imitate what the teacher shows as an example. 
This intentional imitation is certainly one of the most im- 
portant vehicles of social organization. The desire to act 
like certain models becomes the most powerful social 
energy. But even the highest differentiation of society 
does not eliminate the constant working of the automatic, 
impulsive imitation. 

The inner relation between imitation and suggestion 
shows itself in the similarity of conditions under which 
they are most effective. livery increase of suggestibility 
facilitates imitation. In any emotional excitement of a 
group every member submits to the suggestion of the 
others, but the suggestion is taken from the actual move- 
ments. A crowd in a panic or a mob in a riot shows an 
increased suggestibility by which each individual automat- 
ically repeats what his neighbors are doing. Even an 
army in battle may become either through enthusiasm or 



SUBMISSION 261 

through fear a group in which all individuality is lost 
and everyone is forced by imitative impulses to fight or 
escape. The psychophysical experiment leaves no doubt 
that this imitative response releases the sources of strongest 
energy in the mental mechanism. If the arm lifts the 
weight of an ergograph until the will cannot overcome 
the fatigue, the mere seeing of the movement carried out 
by others whips the motor centers to new efficiency. 

"We saw that our feeling states are both causes and ef- 
fects of our actions. "We cannot experience the impulse to 
action without a new shading of our emotional setting. 
Imitative acting involves, therefore, an inner imitation of 
feelings too. The child who smiles in response to the smile 
of his mother shares her pleasant feeling. The adult who 
is witness of an accident in w^hich some one is hurt 
imitates instinctively the cramping muscle contractions of 
the victim, and as a result he feels an intense dislike 
without having the pain sensations themselves. From such 
elementary experiences an imitative emotional life de- 
velops, controlled by a general sympathetic tendency. AYe 
share t^e pleasures and the displeasures of others through 
an inner imitation which remains automatic. In its richer 
forms this sympathy becomes an altruistic sentiment ; it 
stirs the desire to remove the misery around us and un- 
folds to a general mental setting through which every 
action is directed toward the service to others. But from 
the faintest echoing of feelings in the infant to the highest 
selfsacrifice from altruistic impulse, we have the common 
element of submission. The individual is feeling, and ac- 
cordingly acting, not in the realization of his individual 
impulses, but under the influence of other personalities. 

This subordination to the feelings of others through 
sympathy and pity and common joy takes a new psycho- 
logical form in the affection of tenderness and especially 
of parental love. The relation of parents to children in- 
volves certainly an element of superordination, but the 



262 PSYCHOLOGY 

mentally strongest factor remains the subordination, the 
complete submission to the feelings of those Avho are de- 
pendent upon the parents' care. In its higher develop- 
ment the parental love will not yield to every momentary 
like or dislike of the child, but will adjust the educative 
influence to the lasting satisfactions and to the later sources 
of unhappiness. But the submission of the parents to the 
feeling tones in the child's life remains the fundamental 
principle of the family instinct. While the parents' love 
and tenderness means that the stronger submits to the 
weaker, even up to the highest points of selfsacrifice, the 
loving child submits to his parents from feelings which 
are held together by a sense of dependence. This feeling 
of dependence as a motive of subordination enters into 
numberless human relations. Everywhere the weak lean 
on the strong, and choose their actions under the influence 
of those in whom they have confidence. The correspond- 
ing feelings show the manifold shades of modesty, admira- 
tion, gratitude and hopefulness. Yet it is only another 
aspect of the social relation if the consciousness of de- 
pendence upon the more powerful is felt with fear and 
revolt, or with the nearly related emotion of envy. 

Aggression and Selfexpression. — The desire to assert 
oneself is no less powerful in the social interplay than 
the impulse to submission. Society needs the leaders as 
well as the followers. Selfassertion presupposes contact 
with other individuals. ]\Ian protects himself against the 
dangers of nature and man masters nature ; but he asserts 
himself against men who interfere v\dth him or whom he 
wants to force to obedience. The most immediate reaction 
in the compass of selfassertion is indeed the rejection of 
interference. It is a form in which even the infant shows 
the opposite of submission. He repels any effort to dis- 
turb him in the realization of the instinctive impulses. 
From the simplest reaction of the infant disturbed in his 
play or his meal, a straight line of development leads to 



SUBMISSION 263 

the fighting spirit of man, whose pugnaciousness and whose 
longing for vengeance force his will on his enemies. Every 
form of rivalry, jealousy and intolerance finds in this feel- 
ing group its source of automatic response. The most com- 
plex intellectual processes may be made subservient to this 
selfasserting emotion. 

But the effort to impose one's will on others certainly 
does not result only from conflict. An entirely different 
emotional center is given by the mere desire for self- 
expression. In every field of human activity the individual 
may show his inventiveness, his ability to be different from 
others, to be a model, to be imitated by his fellows. The 
normal man has a healthy instinctive desire to claim recog- 
nition from the members of the social group. This inter- 
feres neither with the spirit of coordination nor with the 
subordination of modesty. In so far as the individual de- 
mands acknowledgment of his personal behavior and his 
personal achievement, he raises himself by that act above 
others. He wants his mental attitude to influence and con- 
trol the social surroundings. In its fuller development this 
inner setting becomes the ambition for leadership in 
the affairs of practical life or in the sphere of cultural 
work. 

The superficial counterpart is the desire for self display 
with all its variations of vanity and boastfulness. From 
the most bashful submission to the most ostentatious self- 
assertion, from the selfsacrifice of motherly love to the 
pugnaciousness of despotic egotism, the social psychologist 
can trace the human impulses through all the intensities of 
the human energies which interfere with equality in the 
group. Each variation has its emotional background and 
its impulsive discharge. Within normal limits they are all 
equally useful for the biological existence of the group and 
through the usefulness for the group ultimately serviceable 
to its members. Only through superordination and sub- 
ordination does the group receive the inner firmness which 



264 PSYCHOLOGY 

transforms the mere combination of men into working 
units. They give to human society that strong and yet 
flexible organization which is the necessary condition for 
its successful development. 



B. THE COMPLEX SOCIAL PROCESSES 

CHAPTER XIX 

ORGANIZATION 

The Individual and the Social Mind. — We have singled 
out those processes in the individual minds which are de- 
pendent upon the coexistence of men and which at the 
same time serve the formation of social groups. We spoke 
of the individual differences by which one mind is set off 
from others. We discussed the mutual attraction of these 
different minds and finally the emotions and impulses 
which subordinate or superordinate one mind to others. 
Seen from the standpoint of the social group ever}^ one of 
these individuals with his mental acts appears as an ar- 
tificially isolated fragment. The combination which results 
from their approach, submission and selfassertion is the 
reality with which the social psychologist is concerned. 

His interests naturally refer to two aspects. He asks 
how the real social groups become organized, and, secondly, 
how these organizations work. His problems are the struc- 
ture and the development of society. But we must not 
forget that the social functions which we studied are 
not the only activities which enter into the functioning 
of the social group. The individual differences of men, 
their mutual approach, their submission and selfassertion 
secure the organization and through it the working of 
society, but they are certainly not the only events which 
are involved in the life of the social group. The indi- 
vidual does not cease to stand in the midst of nature when 

265 



266 PSYCHOLOGY 

he enters the social group. His personal life with all its 
reactions toward the non-social world is necessarily in- 
cluded in the group as a whole. The development of the 
human aggregate in its complex form includes, therefore, 
the individual processes as much as the strictly social 
processes. 

But we must consider one more factor of utmost impor- 
tance. It may be brought to sharpest relief, if we com^ 
pare the social mind with the individual mind. Such a 
comparison is not meant simply as a metaphor. It is a 
true, far-reaching analogy, an account of really cor- 
responding processes, and a careful tracing of the similari- 
ties can really help us to understand the one through the 
other. In our individual consciousness, the elements were 
the sensations and their combination was effected in the 
mind by association, their superordination and subordinax 
tion by reenforcement and inhibition. In the social mind 
the elements are the individuals; their combination is se- 
cured by their approach and intercourse, their superordina- 
tion and subordination by submission and selfassertion. 
The unity of personality in the individual mind finds its 
analogy on the social side in the unity of the social group, 
ultimately of human civilization as a whole. This was the 
underlying thought throughout the discussion. 

Moreover, we have on both sides an analogous physio- 
logical basis for the mental process. Each mental element 
in the individual is based on the action of a brain cell, and 
these brain cells are connected with one another by cel- 
lipetal and cellifugal fibers. In a corresponding way the ele- 
ment of the social group, the personality, has as its physio- 
logical basis the whole individual brain, and these brains 
are connected with one another through the centripetal 
and centrifugal parts of the bodies. Each neuron of the 
central nervous system has its receiving nerve fibers by 
which it is stimulated from other cells, and its transmitting 
fibers by which it sends its messages to other cells, but no 



OEGANIZATION 267 

two cells are grown together. They are only in such neigh- 
borhood that the excitation of one can stir up and com- 
municate excitation to the next. The analogy is evident: 
two individuals are never grown together. There is a 
''synapsis" between any two brain neurons, and the 
same ''synapsis" between any two social neurons. But in 
all communication and intercourse the individual transmits 
by his motor apparatus, his muscles, and the next receives 
by his sensory apparatus, his sense organs. 

So far the analogy is simple. But the social psychol- 
ogist who carried the comparison no further would leave 
out two elements of the individual process which we recog- 
nized as fundamentally important for the understanding 
of the psychophysical mechanism. Only if we trace the 
counterparts of those two factors can w^e arrive at a true, 
psychological understanding of organization and develop- 
ment in the social group. We recognized firstly that the 
interplay of the elements in the individual mind can never 
be understood as long as only the direct connections be- 
tween the psychophysical processes are considered. All 
the life experiences of the individual are preserved in 
dispositions of brain cells which are acting without con- 
scious accompaniment. They shape our decisions, they 
represent our knowledge, they make our lips speak before 
we have the words in consciousness. In short, all the 
actions of our mind consist not only of the mutual in- 
fluence of the mental elements, but still more of the 
cooperation of those brain cells through which the million- 
fold psychophysical short cuts are established and which 
outside of consciousness perform the services of mental 
connections. They remember for us; they think for us; 
they will for us. 

We have a perfect analogy to this situation in the ob- 
jective elements of mental communication between indi- 
viduals. A letter, a newspaper, a book, exists outside of 
the individuals themselves, and vet it intermediates be- 



268 PSYCHOLOGY 

tween two or between millions of persons in the social 
group, just as a not conscious cell process intermediates 
between two neurons. The book remembers for the social 
group, and the experiences of the group, objectively re- 
corded in it, shape the social action and the social thought. 
The letter can connect any distant social neurons; the 
paper may distribute the excitement from one point of 
the social group to millions of others. Every objectified 
expression becomes a social short cut. As any psycho- 
physical explanation of the individual mental life must 
give attention to those unconscious brain processes, the 
explanation of the social mind necessarily involves the ob- 
jectified records of experience and suggestions which in- 
termediate between individuals. They are an organic part 
of the psychophysical mechanism of the social group. 

Yet the second factor is no less important. The indi- 
vidual's mind cannot be understood as long as only the 
interconnection of the brain cells is considered, even if the 
not conscious cell activities are added. We have put the 
chief emphasis on the further fact that the psychophysical 
brain function is always the starting point for external 
action. Those millions of brain cells are cooperating in 
producing muscle contractions and gland activities and 
blood-vessel changes; and they themselves are again in- 
fluenced by these external results. The brain cells cause 
the contraction of the muscles in the arms or fingers, and 
these contracted muscles awake new sensations in the brain 
cells. The interplay of the mental states demands this con- 
stant reference to the products outside of the brain. 

We have the analogous process in the productions of the 
social group. They evidently take the form of the social 
institutions. The millions of individuals cooperate in pro- 
ducing the institutional civilization ; the administrative and 
the legal institutions, the educational and the religious in- 
stitutions, the economic and the technical institutions, re- 
sult from the action of the social neurons. But every 



OEGANIZATION 269 

change produced in these institutions has its influence on 
the social group itself. It is a constant interchange be- 
tween the organized group of individuals and their institu- 
tional products. If we were to carry the action theory to 
its social consequence, we should say, moreover, that not 
only does the resulting institution become the source of 
influences on mankind, but that the production itself 
changes the producers, just as the motor impulse in the 
individual shades the sensory process from which it starts. 
The subconscious brain processes, and the peripheral 
bodily processes outside of the brain, are the two great 
classes of activities which are essential for the explanation 
of the individual mind. In exact correspondence the func- 
tions of the intermediating records and the functions of 
the institutional products are the two great realities out- 
side of the individuals, without which the social mind can- 
not be explained. The mere associationism must be over- 
come in social psychology, just as much as in individual 
psychology. 

Involuntary Combinations. — Our survey of the various 
organizations which are actually formed by interrelated 
individuals must be short. We cannot enter into a real 
analysis, but we may at least point to the significant dif- 
ferences of various forms. If we draw lines of division, 
they cross one another frequently. Above all, any two 
classes which we may distinguish may overlap; only their 
extreme forms are sharply different, while many inter- 
mediate forms can be found. We may draw such a line 
between the involuntary and the voluntary grouping. But 
a no less characteristic difference is that between the tem- 
porary and the lasting organizations. We may also dis- 
tinguish between those groups the members of which are 
in immediate contact in space and those where indirect 
intercourse exists. Or we may separate the groups which 
are held together by a personal relation and those in which 
the objective social institutions play an essential role. 



270 PSYCHOLOGY 

Again we have a fundamental difference "between organ- 
izations in which the association of individuals is con- 
spicuously controlled by the individual achievements of 
one or of a few persons, as against those in which all are 
on the same level. 

Every individual can, of course, belong to any number 
of groups, as long as they are not antagonistic. He can 
belong to only one social class or to one race or to one pro- 
fession, to one sex or to one partj^ ; but he can be a member 
of many clubs, take part in many meetings, and trade 
with many merchants. The psychologically still more im- 
portant aspect is that he belongs at the same time to his 
family group and the national group and the party group 
and the church group and the group of the educated and 
the group of his profession, and perhaps to the group of 
the music lovers and the chess players and a hundred other 
mental organizations. No one group absorbs his whole per- 
sonality; he is a member of each group only with a par- 
ticular set of psychophysical functions. The same indi- 
vidual can become a part of as many interpersonal or- 
ganizations as a sensation can become a part of perceptions 
and ideas. 

"We may turn first to the involuntary combinations. 
There is no reason to withhold from them the term organ- 
ization, as this does not necessarily demand an intentional 
plan. The individuals in a beehive are organized, and a 
living body is an organism, because its cells are not only 
an aggregate, but an organization. As soon as the parts 
are in mutual dependence and a change in one part in- 
volves changes in the others, we have the conditions of 
organization fulfilled, even if it is planless and loose. 
Among the unintentional combinations the fugitive chance 
groups may be separated from the permanent ones. The 
most superficial form of the involuntary, fugitive combina- 
tion is found where the members of the group have a com- 
mon purpose, but where the realization of it is entirely 



ORGANIZATION 271 

independent of the existence of the other members. The 
passengers in an electric car pursue their interests without 
reference to one another. Yet a blockade which makes 
each one impatient at once creates through this community 
of slight emotion, a group consciousness to which the in- 
dividual submits the more fully the more suggestible he is. 
The spectators at a theater, the audience at a lecture, the 
witnesses of a street accident, are all in this state of original 
indifference to one another; and yet through the aware- 
ness of the identity of purpose they approach one another. 
Their suggestibility increases, and this reenforces their 
imitativeness. The more the performance or the speaker 
inflames their emotion, the more complete becomes their 
mutual submission, until any signal for applause may 
make them all applaud. But this condition may be at 
the same time most favorable for subordination to a leader. 
A street crowd swept by the same emotion is easily organ- 
ized; the initiative of a few may lead the mass to actions 
which the average member of the crowd in isolation would 
not have chosen or even which his reason or his taste or 
his morality would have resisted. Processes of organiza- 
tion of this type reach their climax in a riot where common 
indignation binds the members for a common attack, or in 
a panic, where common fear breaks down all resistance to 
the mass suggestion. 

The extreme contrasts to such explosive cooperation are 
those involuntary organizations which bind men for life. 
These relations may be firm and personal like those between 
parents and children, or loose and impersonal like those 
between the members of a race. Neither the race nor the 
family is an intentional organization ; they have developed 
from natural growth, and yet the individuals are bound 
together by mental ties. The psychical functions upon 
which the relation from person to person depends char- 
acterize the whole resulting organization. When Amer- 
icans and Australians meet, they feel themselves members 



272 PSYCHOLOGY 

of the worldwide organization which is held together by 
the use of the English language. Each has the immediate 
feeling of understanding the other and of being understood 
by him. To this organization the Russian would be a 
stranger. A feeling of linguistic kinship produces a set- 
ting of the psychophysical system which secures a peculiar 
kind of mental unity. But if a number of Americans meet 
in Australia, they feel the Australian to be the outsider. 
They belong to that group of citizens of the United States, 
and an entirely different psychophysical setting makes 
them feel themselves to be members of a definite social 
group. Common memories of a historic national past, 
common attitude toward the ideals of law and politics, 
common pride in their country, and common hope for its 
future, secure a mental interrelation which is fundamen- 
tally different from the linguistic bond. Yet this psycho- 
logical setting, which prepares an inner cooperation with 
every American does not exclude a certain antagonism be- 
tween the white and the colored American citizens. On 
either side racial habits fusing with common joyful or 
painful memories and with common prejudices, produce a 
mental attitude which excludes from the psychical group 
those whom national consciousness includes in the mental 
community. Again among the white Americans those of 
Irish descent feel themselves a psychical group as against 
those of English descent, and among those the poor ones 
feel themselves as belonging together in contrast to the 
rich. 

But any of these affiliations may be crossed again by 
common professions, common interests, common personal 
experiences. The scientific chemist in New York feels b'm- 
self nearer to the chemist in Berlin with whom he agrees 
in scientific theory than to the clergyman or to the shoe- 
maker on the same street who does not even understand 
his chemical language. All the interpersonal connections 
constitute actual psychophysical organizations. Each is re- 



ORGANIZATION 273 

sponsible for significant functions, which would not result, 
if the individuals were detached. From the primitive 
hordes and tribes of the savages to the social classes and 
professions of large cities, from the narrow-minded public 
opinion of a little village community to the moral con- 
sciousness of civilized mankind, psychological organiza- 
tions are shaped by the natural interplay of ideas, feelings 
and impulses; and the social psychologist must study them 
in the same way in which the student of the individual 
mind examines the smaller or larger clusters of sensations. 

Intentional Combinations. — The subordination and 
superordination which shades the naturally developed 
groups easily leads to systematic planning. A common 
impulse forces a group of men into a new movement, a new 
fashion, a new crusade; but while they are attracted to 
one another merely by this feeling of community, their 
natural submission to the prestige of a leader tends to 
take the form of a worked out organization. We need 
not think of statutes and programs, of party platforms 
and national treaties. The will character of the combina- 
tion may exist no less in the case of the smallest and most 
fugitive group. If two strangers meet and begin a con- 
versation, the fleeting interplay of questions and answers 
binds them into a social group created by the distinct pur- 
pose of the participants. If children combine in a game, 
the association is not a chance product but the result of in- 
tention. The group is dissolved when the purpose of the 
common game has been fulfilled ; but as long as the group 
lasts, it has all the features of a psychophysical organiza- 
tion. All social entertainments, all class instruction, are 
controlled by such ideas of passing purposes. 

We said that the spectators at a theater do not seek 
one another; they are unintentionally grouped together. 
But the spectators plus the actors form an intentional or- 
ganization; they demand each other. Above all, our eco- 
nomic life consists of innumerable intentional organizations 



274 PSYCHOLOGY 

from the smallest to the largest. A factory with its highly 
complex organization, held together by the purpose of 
manufacturing, the simplest workshop, the store, the part- 
nership of two, and the market organization of the whole 
country, are all built up by functions of submission, self- 
assertion, imitation, common individual desires and mu- 
tually supplementing individual differences, held together 
by the purpose to effect certain commercial or industrial 
transactions. 

Every great cultural purpose demands this manifoldness 
of social units, of which the smaller become elements of 
the larger, just as in the individual the ideas become parts 
of thoughts and the thoughts parts of theories. Every 
local political party enters into the large party and that 
into the political life of the nation, and the nation into 
the international concert. Involuntary and voluntary 
formations penetrate one another and fuse. The involun- 
tary union in love is harmonized with the purposive union 
in marriage. Every community thus presents an inex- 
haustible wealth of involuntary and voluntary combina- 
tions, fleeting and lasting, loose and firm, narrow and wide, 
all influencing one another in harmony or by interference. 



CHAPTER XX 
ACHIEVEMENT 

The Biological Aspect. — The social organization itseK 
is never the end of the social process. The groups are 
formed intentionally to produce a definite result, or unin- 
tentionally with the objective effect that something is 
achieved by cooperation. Two children may sit down for a 
game of checkers; ten thousand workingmen and superin- 
tendents may be organized in a factory for the production 
of electric lamps; fifty million men may be organized po- 
litically in a state for the creation of laws. Every time 
the processes which simply establish the group as such and 
hold the group together and organize it for a unified action 
can be distinguished from the functions by which the or- 
ganization achieves its results. 

Only through these productive functions does the group 
gain its biological usefulness. "We explained the sensory 
functions of the individual biologically by their being con- 
nected with actions. This sensory-motor process as a whole 
is useful, while any part of it would be without value for 
the adjustment of the organism; and only what is useful 
admits of biological explanation. The same principles can 
be applied here for the social organization. The group sur- 
vives in the struggle for existence on account of the useful 
adaptation of its achievement to the conditions under 
which it is organized. Not surviving does not mean here 
that the individual members are destroyed, but that the 
group as such is lost. A social group or a political party 
or a business corporation may go out of existence and lose 
its organization on account of its ill-adjusted achievement 

275 



276 PSYCHOLOGY 

without the biological destruction, the death, of the in- 
dividuals. 

From such a biological standpoint it appears evident that 
the social achievement of human groups has a long prep- 
aration behind it. The herds of animals, the flocks of 
birds, the swarms of bees, are united by elementary im- 
pulses and reactions, and these impulses are bred by nature 
on account of the useful achievement of the groups. 
Above all, the feeding and rearing of the newborn animals 
must be considered as a mental function of the mating 
group. Moreover, as the comparative psychologist con- 
trasts not only the mental life of the human individual 
with that of the animal, but also contrasts the various 
stages from infancy to maturity, the social psychologist too 
may compare not only the aggregations of men with those 
of beasts, but the various stages in the development of 
mankind from savagery to mature civilization. 

The biological aspect, finally, also suggests the compari- 
son between the normal and the aljnormal groups. We rec- 
ognized that a mental disturbance in the individual may 
result from the destruction of the psychophysical elements 
or from their faulty functioning in relation to one another 
or from external disturbances such as poisons produced by 
the glands of the body. All these three forms may inter- 
fere too with the functions of the social aggregate. A 
tribe, a race, a nation, may decay because its smallest 
parts, the individuals or the families, have become worth- 
less or are dominated by destructive habits— do not raise 
children or are ruined by vicious mental impulses like 
overindulgence in alcohol. But it may also be unable to 
survive because the members interfere with one another, 
exhaust themselves in revolutions and massacres, or injure 
one another by graft and corruption, lack of public spirit 
and recklessness. And, thirdly, a community may be de- 
stroyed by an external influence, an enemy or an imported 
social poison, customs and beliefs which do not fit the 



ACHIEVEIMENT 277 

people and which undermine their vigorous energies. The 
psychopathology of the social functions from a quarrel of 
playing children and the breaking of a marriage tie in 
divorce to the disruption of churches or wars between large 
nations, is the necessary counterpart of social psychology. 
And here too the organic disturbances in which the 
elements are destroyed and become unfit for a renewing 
of the social organization, must be separated from the func- 
tional disorders in which the removal of the irritation can 
lead to a reestablishment of the original unity. 

Material and Methods. — Exact material will be most 
available in the form of industrial statistics, moral statis- 
tics, political statistics and so on. The social psychologist, 
however, may also gather material from selfobservational 
analysis by the individuals who enter into a social group. 
It is even not impossible to create such groups artificially 
and to examine these questions by experimental laboratory 
methods. Miniature models of social groups are used in 
order to observe the development of the social psychologi- 
cal function. Experiments on suggestion or imitation ap- 
pear almost like experiments in individual psychology, and 
yet belong strictly to social psychology. 

The social character is more prominent in experiments 
on intentional deception, on the unveiling of hidden 
thought, or on the coincidence of associations in several in- 
dividuals. More complicated experiments lead to the study 
of the thought processes in question and answer or in 
artificially simplified conversations. Other experiments 
have been carried on with reference to votes and the mental 
effects of discussions before the voting, or with regard to 
the growth of rumors and the changes of narratives which 
spread from one individual to another. Into the same 
group fall experiments on the school work of children who 
work in classes as compared with their home work, or on 
the efficiency of workingmen in contact with one another 
as compared with their achievement when they are 



278 PSYCHOLOGY 

isolated. The laboratory study of social psychological phe- 
noniena is certainly still at its very beginning, but the 
various efforts made so far suggest that it may be no less 
successful than the experimental psychology of the indi- 
Tidual. Beside the experiment the questionnaire method has 
been successful in securing valuable material for the 
.analysis of group processes. 

Finally we may reconstruct the functioning of the social 
^roup from the completed and detached products of its 
life. The development of the languages and of the legends 
which are witnesses of past civilizations, can well be under- 
stood as the outcome of mental functions which depend 
upon personal contact. But even where individual per- 
sonalities must have originated the creations by independ- 
ent thought, as in politics or art, in law or technic, the 
final products are reflections of a social functioning. The 
laws and the literature, the churches and the cities, tell 
the story of the working of social groups. 

The Types of Social Achievements. — While the aim of 
every social group is the production of new achievements, 
this creative function may be preceded and supplemented 
by assimilative functions. The group must acquire knowl- 
edge and abilities and be aroused to certain interests in 
order to proceed to its progressive activity. It must absorb 
the traditions which secure the continuity of its organiza- 
tion; it must become versed in the customs; it must be 
imbued with the belief in its own significance and mission. 
This finds its fullest expression in the most fundamental 
group, the state, in which the submission to the laws and 
the customs of the country, the acquiring of its language, 
the understanding of its history and of its traditions, and 
the patriotic belief in its honor and its mission in the 
world blend to secure effectiveness. Yet the smaller 
groups, the essential ones like the family, and the most 
superficial ones like a club, depend upon a.<^?imilation to 
become productive. Of course in the midst of a large 



ACHIEVEMENT 279 

group, which demands division of labor, this assimilative 
function may be detached and isolated : the schools and the 
nurseries and the patriotic festivities are small groups 
within the large group of the state, which serve this pre- 
paratory function. In the same way a trade has its ap- 
prentice courses and a church its Sunday schools. Even 
the play of children trains them early for the social inter- 
play of the adults. 

Everyone of these social functions can be resolved into 
mental processes in the individual; and yet the coopera- 
tion, the subordination and the superordination which are 
involved in the assimilative process, make the group func- 
tion even in the simplest case something entirely different 
from a mere summation of the individual activities. The 
teaching of the adult and the learning of the child are 
dependent upon the consciousness of mutual reaction. The 
selfassertion of the teacher and the intellectual submission 
of the pupil must intertwine not only as two objective 
causes for the resulting effect, but the teacher must feel 
the attitude of the pupil, and the pupil that of the teacher. 
Yet to a certain degree this reaction may become onesided. 
The assimilation process may start from the lifeless prod- 
uct, the printed book, the painting, the building. The 
spirit of a personality speaks to the reader or spectator; 
and yet the reaction may no longer reach the author or 
artist. To-day we may still enter into a mental group with 
Plato and assimilate the idealism of his dialogues, as. we 
cannot absorb his thoughts without associating with them 
the idea of his personality and feeling the attitude of sub- 
mission to the suggestive power of his expressions. 

As every sensory combination in the mind leads to 
characteristic motor settings and actions, every social or- 
ganization of minds leads to neiv social influences and pro- 
ductions. A little chance group may amuse itself with a 
game, or may settle a discussion. The enjoyment gained 
and the intellectual agreement secured are actual products 



280 PSYCHOLOGY 

of the organized mental intercourse. Workingmen help- 
ing one another to lift a load too heavy for one produce 
a momentary external effect. The significance of the prod- 
uct grows with the lasting character of the group. The 
lifework of parents who mold and shape the morals and 
intellect of their children stands before us as the highest 
type of achievement of the lasting small group. On the 
other hand the importance of the product may grow with 
the enlargement of the group, even if the result is fugi- 
tive. The caprice of a few is insignificant, but if wide 
circles organized as classes turn their common interest in 
one or another direction, we see the powerful products of 
public opinion, of fashion, of mass movements. But above 
these passing fancies of the crowd we see the true com- 
mon achievement of the communities organized in political, 
economic, religious, scientific, artistic and professional 
groups. The organization of the state secures defense 
against its outer enemies by its armies, and prosecution of 
its inner enemies by its criminal courts. The economic or- 
ganizations supply and distribute food, shelter and cloth- 
ing; cultural groups produce new scientific and artistic, 
moral and religious thoughts which crystallize in lasting 
works. An unceasing creation through the medium of 
social organization necessarily results, and builds up the 
civilization of mankind. 

The higher the level of development, the more we see 
personalities taking the leadership. Their individual 
imagination, their constructive power and inventiveness, 
their bold reasoning and their productive talent, aim 
toward new goals and strive for unheard-of values. Be- 
hind every great movement in modern statecraft or in 
engineering, in hygiene or in art, stands a great polit- 
ical mind or a masterbuilder, a scientific genius or a great 
esthetic seer, even when millions are following his lead. 
Yet the social psychologist has no right to put the em- 
phasis on this independence and originality of the in- 



ACHIEVEMENT 281 

ventor. Psychologically he is above all the product of 
his time, and therefore part of the social group. His most 
daring innovation is only slightly removed from the con- 
sciousness of the community, if compared with the men- 
tal products of other cultural levels. Even the greatest 
inventor is, first of all, a great selective imitator, and his 
achievement is dependent upon the means of expression 
and the objective treasures of civilization in which the 
mental life of the surrounding and of preceding genera- 
tions have discharged their psychical activity. Men of the 
genius of Kant and Goethe and Beethoven may have been 
born among the old German tribes two thousand years 
ago as well as among their descendants of a later century, 
but the Beethoven of that time would simply have beaten 
the drum better than his neighbors. The musical genius 
needed a development of the acoustical technic through 
twenty centuries of musical production before the boldness 
of his tone imagination could revolutionize the esthetic 
world. 

But the full process of civilization does not end with the 
production. The achievement itself becomes a starting 
point for new stimulation of the social organism. What- 
ever intellect or temperament or character have created 
is assimilated by learning and tradition, by enjoyment and 
belief. It enters into the customs and standards, into the 
educational equipment and the national spirit. The par- 
ents learn from the children, the teachers from their 
pupils, the nation from its servants. A continuous action 
and reaction leads to incessant progress. Every new stim- 
ulus irradiates over the social group, and through the co- 
operation of all its members new settings, new actions, new 
implements of civilization, new institutions, are created; 
and everyone of these in its turn works as a stimulus. The 
school, the court, the church, the market, the library, the 
city, are changed and renewed by the millionfold efforts 
of the community, and every change lifts or lowers the 



282 PSYCHOLOGY 

community itself and influences its new striving. Hence 
the effect of every psychological enrichment of the social 
group and of every psychological deficiency rapidly grows 
through this circular process. "With the change in strength 
or in weakness the group shifts its place in the larger 
groups to which it belongs, becomes submissive where it 
was selfasserting, or superior where it was subordinated. 
This ceaseless forming of new organizations in the plastic 
psychophysical structure of social mankind is the endless 
progress of civilization. 



BOOK II. PURPOSIVE PSYCHOLOGY 



PAKT I. PEINCIPLES OF PUEPOSIVE 
PSYCHOLOGY 

CHAPTER XXI 

IMMEDIATE REALITY 

The Two Psychologies. — AYe have described and ex- 
plained the world of mental processes. We began with the 
simplest elements which selfobservation discovers in the 
individual mind and traced their combinations in con- 
sciousness. Each elementary content of consciousness was 
accepted as an accompaniment of simple brain processes, 
and their interplay explained the structure and function 
of the w^hole personality. Finally we studied the combina- 
tions of these individuals in social groups and saw that 
these psychophysical groups are themselves again elements 
of the widest psychophysical system, the- totality of human 
civilization. There may still be much dispute about the 
explanation of details; different theories may connect the 
facts in different ways; and above all, countless facts still 
demand faithful study before the explanation of the men- 
tal material can reach the level which the explanations of 
the physicist and chemist have reached to-day. 

Yet however incomplete may be the picture which the 
causal psychologist can outline at present, he knows at 
least that no human mental function can exist which goes 
on outside of the causally explainable processes. It would 
be absurd for him to imagine that while most mental 
processes are explainable, some are of a different kind, 
demanding therefore a fundamentally different treatment, 

285 



286 PSYCHOLOGY 

for instance an interpretation and inner understanding. 
In popular psychology we are readily inclined to admit 
such a discrimination and to divide the mental phenomena 
into those which have causes and others which have a 
meaning. That is the easiest way; it seems only natural 
to stick to the principles of explanation when we deal with 
memory or with mental disturbances and to replace them 
with a kind of inner meaning when we turn to the feelings 
or the judgment, the will or the personality. The scien- 
tific student cannot be satisfied with such a see-saw psy- 
chology. The possibility of explaining mental processes is 
not a discovery, hut a postulate. A mental process which 
cannot yet be inclosed in the causal system offers us an 
unsolved problem, and we know only that it can never be 
solved, if we give up the principle of explanation. 

The physicist would never be satisfied with the fancy 
that certain molecules are not included in the physical 
universe which is governed by the physical laws. If he 
aims toward scientific knowledge of nature, he takes it for 
granted beforehand that every part of nature is controlled 
by physical causality. This by no means interferes with 
his right to see the whole universe from an entirely dif- 
ferent point of view. From the depths of religious emo- 
tion, he may see it as the unfolding of a divine will. Then 
the world is full of miracles and symbolic actions; and 
this religious image of reality may be no less consistent and 
no less complete than that of physical science. How these 
two standpoints can be harmonized in the unity of a life 
philosophy is not our problem here. But a mixture of the 
two would be neither science nor religion. It would spoil 
physics by mysticism and would destroy spiritual religion 
by materialism. 

We demanded at the threshold of our work that the 
psychologist be equally consistent. If he explains mental 
life, he simply presupposes from the start that mental life 
is explainable and that there is no corner of the mind 



IMMEDIATE EEALITY 287 

which his searchlight cannot reach. "We had a right to 
propose a psychophysical explanation for will and emo- 
tion, for personality and social struggle and harmony. No 
fragment of mental life is left over. When the causal psy- 
chologist has made his inventory, nothing remains which 
is unsuited for explanation. Every human mental state 
from the first vague sensations of the infant to the highest 
cultural processes of the nations must have its place in the 
picture which we have outlined. 

If nevertheless we are not at the end of psychology, it is 
evident that the study which lies before us does not refer 
to other mental experiences which lie outside of the realm 
of causal psychology, but to the same inner life, seen from 
a different standpoint. We characterized this doubleness 
of attitude before we began our causal analysis. "We sepa- 
rated the aim to explain mental life from the funda- 
mentally different aim to understand its meaning. These 
two ways of approach, however, are not related like those 
of the physicist and the theologian to nature. The relig- 
ious view of the physical universe lies entirely outside of 
physics. It is not a physics of a different kind, but an 
act of faith, which has nothing to do with natural science. 
In physics itself only one standpoint is possible. But for 
the inner life two different standpoints must be acknowl- 
edged as justified in the midst of psychology itself, since 
both allow a purely theoretical and systematic understand- 
ing of the whole experience, and since both thus have the 
right to the term psychology. Purposive psychology is not 
controlled hy faith or imagination or intuition, hut depends 
upon a thorough study and analysis of actual facts. 

We also emphasized from the first that the two pictures 
of mental life are combined in our daily intercourse. We 
may try to understand the neighbor who talks with us ; and 
yet in the next moment, we may notice that he is losing 
the thread of the conversation, and we begin to think 
about the causes which produced that effect in his mind. 



288 PSYCHOLOGY 

We may sympathize with his grief ; and in the next instant 
consider by what mental intrusions we can effect a dis- 
traction of his mind. We may be impressed by his char- 
acter; and yet at the same time theorize as to the inher- 
itance elements in the make-up of his personality. The 
explanation of the loss of memory, the production of the 
distracting factors and the study of the inherited elements, 
belong entirely to the causal aspect. But the interest in 
the conversation, the sympathy with the emotion, the ad- 
miration for the character belong to our purposive treat- 
ment of the other man's mind. Our method was consist- 
ently to separate the two views and to begin with that 
which is usually treated as the view of scientific psychol- 
ogy, namely the causal. In doing so, we simply began with 
the mental life as an objective content of consciousness, 
which everyone finds in his selfobservation and which 
must be described and explained. 

Causal Psychology and Reality. — ^As we now come to 
the purposive view, it seems essential to examine more 
fully the relation of the two views to the reality of our 
life. In order to have a foundation for the work in 
causal psychology we are satisfied with the colorless state- 
ment that we find perceptions and memories and feelings 
and volitions in ourselves, that they are contents of our 
consciousness and that the subject of consciousness is sim- 
ply aware of them. That is indeed the situation which 
the causal psychologist faces and to which all his com- 
parative and experimental, descriptive and physiological 
efforts refer. But is it really a situation which the imme- 
diate experience of life presents to us? Is not life essen- 
tially remolded when we speak of these perceptions and 
volitions as contents in ourselves? We came into the 
neighborhood of this problem repeatedly. We can no 
longer delay to examine it. But if we test these presup- 
positions of causal psychology, we must distinguish be- 
tween the perceptions and ideas on the one side and the 



IMMEDIATE EEALITY 289 

feelings and inner activities on the other. The two cases 
are fundamentally different. 

" perceive this room in which I am writing, and through 
the window the landscape before me. But have I really a 
right to say that I find all this as ideas in myself ? Through 
the open window the song of a bird comes to me; I hear 
it. Is that song in me? Do I hear it in myself? Do I 
not hear it outside in the branches of the tree 1 And even 
if I remember the mountain I saw last vacation, what I 
have before me now is the beautiful mountain itself. I do 
not know it as something housed in myself at present. I 
feel that I enjoy at present its noble shape, but I do not 
find it as a memory idea closeted in myself. The things 
which make up our experience, the trees and stars, the 
tones and noises, and everything which we find in the 
w^orld around us, in the world of the present and in the 
world of the past, have evidently been taken into our- 
selves by the theories of the psychologist and have been 
made into a bundle of our personal perceptions and mem- 
ories. This is a tremendous iransformation of reality, and 
nothing is more surprising than that it no longer surprises 
us. As causal psychologists we are indeed accustomed to 
sit at a table and to hold a book in our hand, and yet to 
describe both the book and the table as contents in our 
mind, as perceptions in ourselves. 

But the other change is hardly less revolutionary. We 
claim as causal psychologists that we find the feelings and 
volitions and all the other attitudes and actions in our 
mind as something which we can observe. Yet this is cer- 
tainly not a natural account of our immediate personal 
experience. We feel ourselves acting in those impulses and 
in those feelings of liking and disliking, but we do not find 
them like objects which we watch as spectators. We live 
through them as expressions and deeds of ourselves, and 
we do not become aware of them with the indifference of 
an onlooker. The same contrast forces itself on us, when 



290 PSYCHOLOGY 

we speak of the inner life of other persons. We treat 
their will in causal psychology as if it were an object for 
their self observation, but in real life we surely ha^ e a 
much more immediate grasp of another man's will, if we 
understand it by entering into its meaning and purpose. 
If we agree with his decision or if we disapprove of his at- 
titude, it would be entirely foreign to our instincts to 
think of those will acts as objects in his consciousness. We 
take another man's will as an immediate subjective ex- 
pression as much as our own will. We feel that he will^ 
his will, not that he finds it in himself as an observable 
content. We might call this knowledge of the will in an- 
other mind an acknowledgment. We acknowledge our 
neighbor as the subject of his acts; and again we have 
left the immediate reality far behind us, if we treat his 
attitudes as such objective material for his introspection. 
Moreover, we have handled his perceptions and memories 
as we did our own. We never find the newspaper which 
he is reading as a physical thing in his hand, and at the 
same time as a perceptive idea in his mind. We acknowl- 
edge only his reading of that paper before him and trans- 
form our experience of him by projecting a copy of the 
thing which he uses into his personality. 

Scientific Reconstruction. — There can be no doubt that 
we have the right to proceed by such a method and to 
remold our inner life and that of all other individuals in 
our theories if it serves a valuable end of thought. The 
scientist is not a mere photographer. The physicist who 
considers outer nature as a combination of atoms speaks 
of elements which no one can see; and yet he has a right 
to reshape the experience of the outer world by such 
thoughts, because they are necessary for the fulfillment of 
his purpose, for understanding the universe as a system 
of causes and effects. We believe in the value of this end 
of thought and therefore we accept as truth those thought 
transformations of the world of experience which the 



IMMEDIATE EEALITY 291 

physicist needs in the service of his aim. The psychologist 
surely has the same right to go beyond the mere imme- 
diate experience of inner life, if important ends of thought 
can be served by it. AYe have seen what ends the causal 
psychologist strives to fulfill. He wants to understand 
the inner life too as a system of causes and effects and 
to recognize every experience as the necessary result of 
foregoing conditions, in order to foresee what will happen 
in the mind and to influence it. If this is the purpose, any 
reconstruction of the inner life which helps toward this 
goal must be welcomed as psychological truth ; but it must 
not be forgotten that it is indeed a reconstruction and not 
original life reality. 

The steps which the causal psychologist had to take before 
he could claim that mental life is made up of ideas and volitions 
which are contents of consciousness, material for objective in- 
trospection, can easily be retraced. If his purpose is to foresee 
how the individual will behave, to what he will attend, how he 
will feel about a new situation, what he will select, then he must, 
first of all, know what objects are within the reach of the par- 
ticular indi^-idual. Hence from the world of possible things he 
cuts out those to which the particular person takes an attitude, 
which he notices or attends to or remembers or expects, and the 
psychologist treats them as if they were all inclosed in the 
personality itself. In the midst of psychological work we speak 
as if we had the room which we see as a content in our mind. 
But there are not two rooms, one containing us and the other 
contained in us. What we really mean is that we have an 
interest to consider this room only with reference to the fact that 
it is given to us and that we notice it, while we abstract from 
the fact that it also exists for every other man. We might say 
that we split the real perceived or remembered or expected thing 
into two artificial objects. The one which we think as being 
without in its original place keeps all which has no special 
relation to the individual and which is common to all: we call 
it the physical thing. The other part is the same thing in so 
far as it belongs in the sphere of our personal experience. It is. 



292 PSYCHOLOGY 

drawn into our personality itself. What things really are within 
his reach everyone can find out only for himself, and that is 
what we call selfobservation. 

These real things which the causal psychologist splits into 
the physical and the psychical are the objects of our life in- 
terest, of our liking and disliking, of our preferring and reject- 
ing. But if we consider the objects with reference to cause 
and effect only, the neutral attitude of a mere passive spectator is 
needed. As selfobserving, causal psychologists we have to stop 
our liking and disliking and have to eliminate our will toward 
the objects. We must simply take the psychical contents as 
objects of awareness. Then only can we study their connections 
in order to determine what will result from their interplay. The 
psychologist looks on the contents of the mind with a neutrality 
equal to that of the astronomer. As soon as the outer world is 
to us no longer the object, but is replaced by mere perceptions 
and memories of the world, an indifferent selfobservation takes 
the place of the original actions of will. The psychical objects 
are nothing but material of which we become aware. 

But the causal psychologist certainly cannot leave the feel- 
ings and volitions out of play. The next necessary step in order 
to be loyal to his purpose must be to consider these inner activi- 
ties also as contents of consciousness. This is easily taken, 
and every true selfobserver instinctively goes over to this scheme. 
What he really does is to substitute the inner perception of the 
organism for the feeling of the self. In our immediate reality 
of pulsating life, we know ourselves as the subjects of our will, 
which expresses itself through the actions of our organism. But 
if we give an introspective account of ourselves as objects, we 
must take this organism as our real self and the perception of 
its activities as the consciousness of the personal reactions. In 
our description and explanation of the emotions, volitions, and 
ideas of personality we have gone along this same way step 
by step. We did it there as if we found in those combinations 
of bodily sensations the real emotions and feelings themselves. 
Looking backward from a higher point of view we must recognize 
that all those introspective observations were ultimately remolded 
constructions. They were needed, because they alone allowed 
us to treat the functions of the self as describable objects and to 



IMMEDIATE EEALITY 293 

link them in the chain of causal events. The results, accord- 
ingly, were psychological truth, but they certainly led us far 
away from the immediate reality of inner life. It is this reality 
which must be analyzed and systematized by the purposive 
psychologist. 

Purposive Understanding. — The contrast between the 
purposive interpretation and the causal description of the 
personal and interpersonal life is complete at every point. 
If we pursue the purposive routine of the day, our objects 
are not in us, but spread over the world, and our per- 
sonality is not perceived, but acting. Another man is not 
the object of awareness but of acknowledgment. There 
is nothing whatever to be described, everything to be un- 
derstood. And, above all, nothing is to be explained, be- 
cause everything must be understood in relation to its pur- 
poses. The various activities are connected not by an under- 
lying brain process, but by their internal relation. One 
idea means another idea, one will points to another will. 
But where there is no reason to ask for causes, we have 
freedom. In the world of causality, cause and effect can 
be expressed by equations; in the world of freedom and 
meaning, an inexhaustible creation, an unlimited heighten- 
ing of realities is possible. In the world of cause and ef- 
fect, nothing is good and nothing is bad, because every- 
thing is simply happening, and consciousness is a passive 
spectator: nature is always indifferent. In the world of 
freedom, the meaning and the will point to purposes which 
can be valued and every action can be measured by the 
standards of ideal purposes. The ideas and volitions gain 
logical, esthetic and ethical value. 

On the surface it appears as if these two presentations 
of inner life contradict each other and as if the contrast 
could be overcome only by acknowledging the one as true 
and the other as untrue. But the experiences in the 
routine of daily life ought to warn us against such rash- 



294 PSYCHOLOGY 

ness. We actually rely on both in every practical situation, 
and wherever we recognize the one at the expense of the 
other, we neglect certain life interests. The teacher may 
look on the pupil in the schoolroom as a free responsible 
individual and may understand him as a center of mean- 
ing. But if this were all, he would neglect the mechanism 
of that young mind ; he might fatigue its will power, over- 
burden its memory mechanism, neglect the hygienic con- 
ditions of its working and interfere with the processes of 
assimilation. On the other hand, the teacher schooled by 
causal psychology may look on the child only as a mental 
mechanism, where every change must be understood as an 
effect of the psychophysical causes and every thought and 
feeling be regarded as a content of consciousness. But 
if this were all, the best meaning of instruction would be 
lost. A naked calculation of causes and effects would in- 
trude where personal sympathy and personal tact ought 
to control the intercourse. The ideal value of the instruc- 
tion would be lost. The child would be to the teacher 
nothing but a case of psychophysical activity instead of 
being a free individual with growing responsibility worthy 
of personal interest. 

This relation between two or among millions repeats 
itself in every significant phase of social life; it is ulti- 
mately not different in our own intercourse with ourselves. 
"We feel our self as a purposive personality, responsible for 
every thought and mood and intention and judgment, and 
yet we may take our minds as mechanisms in which the 
inherited dispositions and the influences of life have made 
us the necessary products of causes and have aroused the 
particular ideas and moods by association in our conscious- 
ness. We are free and we are bound, but we are not free 
in some parts of our mind and bound in others; we are 
free throughout and bound throughout, in accordance with 
the attitude which we take toward ourselves. If we live 
our life, the world is to us an object of our free activity, 



IMIMEDIATE REALITY 295 

is means and purpose, but the act starts with our inner 
deed, and everything is related to our aims. If we explain 
onr life, our mind is throughout the effect of causes, and 
every will act is determined by preceding processes. 
AVhether we take the one attitude or the other depends 
upon the purpose of our thought. 

If these tendencies of practical life are carried to their 
extreme systematic form, they lead to the two developed 
systems of psychology, the causal and the purposive. But 
as soon as their character is recognized, the illusion that 
they are interfering with each other or that the truth 
of the one is proof of the untruth of the other must disap- 
pear. Both are valuable and significant and both fulfill 
the meaning of truth. They offer different aspects of 
the same life, and they agree with each other as 
well as the physicist's and the chemist's and the mathe- 
matician's accounts of the same physical object har- 
monize. 

Yet if we come to the last word, we must finally recog- 
nize that while the two psychological systems are equally 
true, they are not coordinated. One treats man as an 
object, the other as a subject. Popular thinking is first 
attracted by the objects which can be touched and handled, 
and is therefore inclined to take the world of objects as 
the true world upon which all the subjects depend. The 
philosophically trained mind emancipates itself from such 
superficiality, and must insist on the opposite answer to 
the problem. We do not first find our inner life as an 
object, but we know it immediately as our purposive deed. 
We see it stretched out before us as a series of objects 
only if we purposively seek to understand its causes and 
effects. The objective appearance is therefore entirely de- 
pendent upon our subjective act. It is not the structure 
of mental objects which is the cause of our purpose, hut 
it is our purpose which transforms our purposive life into 
a causal structure. The deed of the subject is the first, 



296 PSYCHOLOGY 

the causal interplay of the objects the dependent reality. 
Our mental life is free, and, through an act of freedom 
we decide to consider it as a mental mechanism in . which 
nothing is free. 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE SOUL 

Purposive Acts and Causality. — When we discussed the 
principles of causal psychology, our central problem was 
the possibility of causal connection between the mental 
processes. The whole aim was to remodel inner life until 
it could be conceived as causally connected. We had to ex- 
amine whether this linldng could be conceived as direct 
or not. We convinced ourselves that a necessary connec- 
tion between mental processes as such is unthinkable. We, 
therefore, had to reject also every theory which seeks the 
tie in unconscious mental processes. On the other hand, we 
found that the purpose can be completely fulfilled by 
coupling the mental processes with brain processes and 
seeking the direct causal connection between the under- 
lying bodily events. This problem of connection must be the 
central one for the theory of purposive psychology, too. But 
the material which is to be connected is certainly very dif- 
ferent now, since we try to grasp inner life as a meaning. 
The contents of consciousness with which causal psychol- 
ogy deals are objects, but the acts which have a meaning 
and which form the material of purposive psychology are 
acts of subjects. Hence if we contrast the mere material, 
we have in causal psychology mental objects which are 
found in consciousness, and in purposive psychology we 
have acts which are performed by a subject. 

To understand a single act, that is, to grasp its meaning, 
to enter into the purposive expression of the self, is simply 
life, not science. Yet even life goes beyond this entirely 

297 



298 PSYCHOLOGY 

isolated grasping of the act. Whether we try to under- 
stand our neighbor's feeling and will and thought, or our 
own, we naturally go beyond that one particular act. We 
ask what it involves. If it is a thought, we try to under- 
stand the underlying ideas of the person who utters it ; if 
it is an action, the character which expresses itself; if it 
is a feeling, the general emotional attitude. Moreover, we 
ask whether the act expresses the personality itself only, 
or whether it possesses an inner relation to ideas and feel- 
ings of others with whom the subject agrees and dis- 
agrees, whom he imitates or rejects. And if a number of 
meaningful expressions are before us, we ask how far they 
contradict one another, how far one thought necessarily in- 
cludes another, how far one resolution necessarily binds 
the subject to come to a certain decision. In all these 
cases we aim toward a connection of one act with other 
acts in the personality. 

Such connections in our daily life may be superficial, 
just as our ordinary causal connections of mental processes 
are very vague and inconsistent. But it indicates that a 
true understanding demands more than the grasping of 
isolated acts, and that a meaning involves the connections 
of one act with other realities in the purposive world. In 
causal psychology we proceed from the fragmentary chance 
explanations with which we are satisfied in our daily inter- 
course to a really systematic connection of all mental proc- 
esses. In the same way we must proceed in purposive 
psychology from those superficial fragmentary connections 
of the purposive acts to a consistent and systematic link- 
ing of all elements of the inner life, in so far as it is ma- 
terial for our understanding. 

If we strive for a complete connection of all inner pur- 
posive acts, that is, of the totality of our inner life in the 
form in which we live through it in our immediate ex- 
perience, we must, above all, be sure not to fall back into 
the thought form of causality. Inner life as we live it 



THE SOUL 299 

never comes to us as cause and ejfect. In popular thought 
exactly the opposite is not seldom proclaimed. We hear 
that our inner experience is the true source of the idea of 
causal connection. AVe feel our will as the cause of the 
movement of the body, and we project, it is claimed, this 
inner experience of causality into the world of nature and 
interpret the happenings outside by these inner impulses 
which make the physical world move. But this is a funda- 
mental misunderstanding, which results from not discrimi- 
nating between the inner life as an object to be observed 
and the inner life as a meaning to be understood. The 
will as we really experience it in our immediate life is 
never the prototype of a cause. Normally we do not even 
detach it from the bodily action and do not consider it 
as preceding, but take the movement as the expression of 
the will, not as an effect. 

It is the outer world of physical bodies which leads man- 
kind to the recognition of causes and effects, and if finally 
a standpoint is reached from which even the human will 
is treated causally, this psychologizing understanding of 
the will presupposes the long schooling through the study 
of natural science. Only when science had reached a high 
level did it become really possible to force the idea of 
causal connection even on the will, because the will could 
be resolved into sensations and feelings and physiological 
processes. But this scientific achievement of causal 
psychology marks the greatest possible distance from the 
immediate experience of the will which we live through. 
This will which has been resolved into its objective ele- 
ments does not will anything, but is only an object of ob- 
servation. The will which wills, and accordingly has mean- 
ing, lies in an entirely different dimension. It is quite 
true that man projects his inner will experience into outer 
nature, but where he is doing that he does not secure a 
causal explanation of nature, but only an inner interpreta- 
tion. Nature itself then becomes a kind of human being. 



300 PSYCHOLOGY 

The wind and the waves become living, and their move- 
ments are the expression of their will. From such a 
poetic or mythological personification of nature no direct 
bridge leads to causal, natural science. 

The real will, grasped as an act which we can under- 
stand, occurs in our experience neither as a cause nor as 
an effect. If we are to bring it into connection with other 
realities, we must know beforehand that it cannot be 
causality which links them. Causality binds physical proc- 
esses, and if the mental life is treated causally it ultimately 
becomes subordinated to the physical behavior of the or- 
ganism, as we have seen in full detail. Our real inner 
acting creates the thought of causal connection, but is 
never subject to it. As soon as we have grasped this cen- 
tral fact, we understand how hopeless it is to try to secure 
a privileged position for the mind in the midst of a causal 
picture of the universe. Too many theories have been 
planned for this purpose. It is felt as a moral degrada- 
tion to consider the interplay of the mind as dependent 
upon the physical processes of nature, and all kinds of loop- 
holes are therefore left in the causal mechanism. The 
mental processes are treated as a special form of energy 
which can be transformed into physical energies as elec- 
tricity can be transformed into magnetism. Or a mind 
substance is imagined which works as a causal mechanism 
of a higher order, producing some of the mental states as 
causal effects without the intrusion of physical processes. 

Such efforts are not only doomed from the start because 
they work with unfit conceptions and destroy the system of 
causality which they are meant to build up, but above all 
the problem itself is meaningless. That inner life which 
man values and wants to see superior to the mere mech- 
anism of matter is not the mind conceived in the thought 
form of causality. The mere mental processes as such have 
no dignity, since they are not the real inner life, hut are 
merely scientific constructions which we need as counters 



THE SOUL 301 

for our calculation. The inner life in which our duties 
lie and which alone has value is that which has a meaning 
and is understood as the expression of a subject. In this 
intentional character it does not admit at all the question 
of objective description and explanation. 

Purposive Acts and Time, — To characterize the ma- 
terial of the purposive psychologist still more fully we may 
add that the acts of our inner life, if they are understood 
as the expression of a subject, are not contained in the 
time which is filled by physical things. If we mean by 
time exclusively that which the physicist means and must 
mean by it, then we even have a right to say that mental 
life in its reality is timeless. Of course my mental life 
goes on between the calendar dates of my birth and death. 
A thought may linger in my mind for several days, a 
joy or a fear may stir my mind through a sleepless night, 
and in the laboratory I may find out by exact measure- 
ment that one sensation group and reaction impulse takes 
a few hundredths of a second more than another. But in 
all these cases the mental experience is treated as a 
psychological process, made dependent upon the physical 
body which necessarily lives in physical time. The mental 
processes as objects of causal psychology are in time, just 
as they are in space. My thoughts last through the time 
which the clock shows, just as they are in this room in 
which I am sitting and are inclosed in the cells of my 
brain. But if I really grasp my thought in the act of 
thinking or my volition in the act of willing, it does 
not come in question with reference to these physical con- 
ditions either of space or of time. I know it only in so far 
as it means something, and the question of how many 
minutes this meaning lasts or whether it is in the front 
or the rear part of my brain is as pointless as if I were 
to ask whether my will is blue or green, salt or sour. 

The acts are intimately related to the time of the 
physical world, as the self takes attitude through them 



302 PSYCHOLOGY 

toward past and present and future. Those objects toward 
which our will is directed are present, those toward which 
we can no longer act are past, and those for which we 
can still prepare an action are future. The time values 
are distributed for the real subject by these purposive acts, 
but the acts are not in the time which they create. We 
have no right to say that the act occurs at the same time 
at which an event in the physical world occurs toward which 
the act is directed. The act is not simultaneous with it, 
nor does it precede it, nor does it follow it: it is itself 
outside of time, just as it is outside of causality. To be 
sure, there is an internal consecutiveness and progress in 
our acts. One act grows out of another, and in an entirely 
different sense we may project the unfolding of our real 
inner life into a purposive time, but that is certainly not 
the time of our calendar in which the stars move and in 
which our brain acts. 

The Connection of Purposive Acts. — What do we really 
aim at when we seek a necessary connection between two 
experiences? Let us look back to the case of the physical 
world. We see that the mere regular succession of two 
physical processes could not possibly satisfy our demand 
for an ultimate understanding. We could not take it for 
granted that a succession would occur the hundredth time 
because it did occur ninety-nine times. Such practical 
observations of regular successions may serve us well for 
the routine of the day, because they make us expect similar 
happenings: but the discovery of such regularities is in- 
sufficient as the goal of scientific explanation. The ideal 
of physics is a natural mechanism in which every particle 
of an atom lasts. Every change results only from a change 
of position, and is affected by energies which last too. If 
nature can be understood in this way, then the successive 
phases of the natural process are really linked by necessity 
since we cannot think them otherwise. The connection be- 
tween cause and effect is then no longer a mere adding 



THE SOUL 303 

together of two processes which have nothing in common. 
On the contrary, cause and effect are then ultimately de- 
pendent upon the fact that the physical substance and 
the physical energies remain the same in every new phase 
of the world process. 

The fact that every particle of substance and the energy 
of the universe remain the same is the only experience 
which does not need any further explanation. It is explana- 
tion in itself, because it is involved in our thought of the 
physical substance and its energies. "We cannot think it 
otherwise, if we seek a consistent idea of nature. The 
world which we actually experience is a ceaseless flux and 
change. Our search for a world in which objects last and 
on which we can rely for our actions leads ns to that 
construction in which the change is understood as a func- 
tion of something which remains forever unchanged. This 
ideal is realized by the scientist's conception of nature. 
The search for causality finds a real logical rockbed only 
where the manifoldness is understood as an ultimate same- 
ness: causality is replaced by identity. 

The search for necessary connections in our real life, 
in our life of purpose and meaning, begins with the 
same motives and ends with the same results as the 
search of the causal scientist. The motive is here, too, to 
bring order into the manifoldness and to take a right atti- 
tude toward a single experience by embedding it into its 
whole setting. The result, on the other hand, is again 
that the apparent change is recognized, or rather recon- 
structed, as a system of identities. Whatever remains the 
same does not need any further connection. Yet what a 
difference between the sameness of the atomistic substance 
in succeeding periods of time and the sameness of will ptir- 
poses in the progress of inner experience. 

If we really seek to understand the continuity of mean- 
ing, we must energetically refuse every reminiscence of 
the continuity of objects. The will treated as a psycho- 



304 PSYCHOLOGY 

logical content of consciousness does not last beyond the 
fractions of a second in which we perceive it; a new will 
act is an entirely new content. But its purpose may re- 
main exactly the same : the will to affirm certain premises 
is identical with the will to affirm the conclusion. The 
one is involved in the other ; the one means the other. They 
are connected in the purposive world, because they are ulti- 
mately the same. The meaning of the definition of a 
triangle and the geometric deductions from it are surely 
very different as objects of psychological self observation, 
but the acts of the subject who grasps them and proceeds 
from the definition to the geometrical propositions are nec- 
essarily bound together by the identity of meaning. 

As in the world of nature every single process points 
backward to its causes and forward to its effects, in the 
world of purposes, too, every single meaning which we 
grasp in ourselves or acknowledge in others has its double 
face. It turns forward to all to which it may lead, 
and backward to that from which it grew. In dealing 
with nature we have the two interests alternately in mind. 
When anything happens, sometimes the causes attract our 
attention, and sometimes only the effects to be expected. 
In our life of purpose our interest fluctuates no less. An 
idea which interests us makes us consider what may result 
from it or from what ideas it sprung. In purposive 
psychology both questions must be answered systematically. 
Thus our general problem is: how can we think the self 
so as to understand every act as identical with other acts 
in the self? 

Our statement that every meaning involves the reference to 
a self demands some further comment, which might easily 
lead too far into the midst of philosophy. We may grasp the 
meaning of an idea, of a judgment, of a demand, without re- 
ferring it to a particular subject. The mathematical truth that 
three times three is nine has a meaning for us without being 
the purposive act of a particular individual. It remains a true 



THE SOUL 305 

statement for us and makes our understanding- independent of 
the question whether tliis or that person is making this mathe- 
matical afifimiation. But ultimately this does not mean that it is 
without reference to a subject; it means only that the idea in- 
terests us without our having anj'' interest in the question of 
which indi^iduals are actively engaged in thinking it, because it 
is binding for the will of every possible individual. The philos- 
opher, accordingly, would not detach it from a reference to sub- 
jective will, but he would relate it to a more than personal will, 
to the will of everybody who is to be acknowledged as a subject 
at all. He therefore discriminates between the purposive idea 
which interests us as the purposive expression of an individual 
self and that which is necessarily affirmed by eveiy possible 
self and which can thus be thought without any reference to 
an individual person. Every logical statement, as such, has this 
more than individual relation: in logic we can entirely abstract 
from this relation to the subject. 

The situation is completely parallel to that of the psychical 
and physical objects of consciousness. There cannot be any 
objects which are not objects for a subject, that perceives them. 
But only in the case of the psychical objects are we really inter- 
ested in their being perceived by a particular individual, and 
we refer them therefore to a special subject. The world of phys- 
ical objects, on the other hand, is no less a world of per- 
ceptible objects, but, as it contains the objects which are objects 
for every possible subject, we have no interest in asking what 
particular subjects are actually involved in the perceptions. 
AVe treat the physical thing, the stone, as something for which 
the question of being perceived by a particular individual may 
be entirely igiiored. We speak of its objective existence in 
nature, as if this had no reference to the possibility of being 
perceived. The physicist abstracts from the perception of his 
objects, and the logician abstracts from the will reference of 
his truths, but ultimately this abstraction in both cases means 
that any possible subject can be substituted. Only when we 
deal with psychical contents of consciousness do we need the 
reference to an individual consciousness, and when we speak of 
psychical purposive acts, we need the reference to indi\idual 
selves. 



306 PSYCHOLOGY 

We want to understand the self so that its acts may be 
conceived identical with one another. The result must be 
a construction which as such goes beyond the actual ex- 
perience just as the ether constructions of the physicist 
go beyond the observations of nature. The aim of this pur- 
posive construction is reached by the theory of the soul. 
The soul is the self conceived as a system of purposes 
which remains identical with itself in developing its poten- 
tial acts as real experiences in response to the acts of 
others and to the objects of the world. 

The Function of the Soul. — The idea of a purposive 
soul with spontaneous activity is as old as human thought 
about man's inner life. Every savage tribe on the sur- 
face of the earth has some word which may fittingly be 
translated as ''soul." The dream in which the sleeper 
leaves his place and wanders afar, the mental disease ip 
which man is not himself but controlled by another self^ 
the death in which the self leaves the body, the reappear- 
ance of the dead in the dreams of the living, and many 
similar motives have led to the primitive soul ideas. The 
special form in which these conceptions were shaped 
throughout the history of mankind depended upon the 
background of general knowledge, the religious and the 
philosophical ideas and not least upon the imagination of 
the peoples and of their individual thinkers. At first it 
was essentially a man in man, a thinner, finer, shadow- 
like, breathlike man; and the motives which led to such 
constructions have never ceased to influence the masses. 

Long periods of human thought were controlled by ideas 
which interpreted the soul as an indestructible simple sub- 
stance. But however the forms of the soul have been con- 
ceived, a purposive, free mental agency has been at all 
times demanded by human thought, and never was really 
suppressed by the passing ideas of a mental mechanism 
after the pattern of natural science. Yet the consistent 
purposive psychologist recognizes that even the soul sub- 



THE SOUL 307 

stance and every conception which has similarity to it, is 
still, to a large degree, under the influence of naturalistic 
ideas. The soul substances were constructed and are still 
constructed to-day, because the philosophers wanted to ex- 
plain the mental actions; and they called the actions free 
inasmuch as the causes lay in the soul itself. But the 
whole question is wrongly put. If we really take the pur- 
posive attitude, we must be consistent and see that there 
is nothing to be explained, because the purposive realitj^ 
is falsified, when it is brought into a system of causes and 
effects. It needs to be interpreted and to be understood, 
but not to be explained from causes, even though the 
causes lie in the soul itself. Our definition of the soul as 
a system of purposes avoids this fundamental mistake, and 
it satisfies every logical demand, as long as unjustified 
questions are not raised. If we are asked to describe this 
soul, such a misleading question is already before us. To 
describe reality means to treat it as an object, and a system 
of purposes which we understand in grasping their mean- 
ing can never be conceived as an object. 

In the same way it would be entirely wrong to think 
that the soul is the cause of the movements of the body. 
This again would simply force us on the road to explana- 
tion. The psychophysical brain processes move the muscles, 
but in the purposive world the life of the soul expresses 
itself in the bodily movements without in any way suggest- 
ing the question of how these movements are effected. It 
the man with whom we are in intercourse really stands 
in a human relation to us and is not the object of observa- 
tional interest, his bodily movements help us to under- 
stand the actions of his soul and do not come in question 
under any other point of view. Nor have we a right to 
ask how one soul can become the cause for actions of an- 
other soul. In the universe of purposes which alone in- 
terests the non-causal psychologist this effect does not 
occur. I know the purpose of my friend, or I do not 



308 PSYCHOLOGY 

know it. The problem how I came to know it, that is, how 
his soul action entered my soul, raises again an issue of 
explanation, which is entirely foreign to our mutual under- 
standing. All these questions of explanation must be 
placed where they belong; that is, in the realm of causal 
psychology. 

How, then, can we characterize the real soul? It is not 
causal; it is not in the physical Ijody ; it is not in the 
physical time; it is not a siil) stance.; it is not an object. 
Positively, it is through all experience identical with itself. 
But, again, we must protect our statement against a natu- 
ralistic interpretation. The purposes of the soul do not 
simply go on like the molecules. It is not an outsider who 
decides that the soul in one act is identical with the soul 
in another act. The identity is one of meaning ; one system 
of acts means another system of acts. In willing the one 
purpose the subject wills the other; and this posits his 
own identity. The soul is continuous as it wills itself in 
every act of experience as the same self. The soul is self- 
conscious, not as if it could be an object for itself, but be- 
cause it affirms its own system of purposes in every new 
act. The soul is free, because it is not dependent upon 
any cause. The soul is immortal, because the biological 
phenomenon of death in the realm of space and causality 
cannot refer to a strictly purposive reality. The life of 
the soul is to be analyzed and its inner relations to be 
traced by the study of purposive psychology. It leads to 
the ultimate problems of mankind, since only the acts of 
the soul and not the causal mental processes can be related 
to the overindividual obligations of truth, beauty and 
morality. Only the soul, finally, and not the causal mental 
mechanism can be conceived as part of the absolute mind 
which embraces the individuals. But we must turn 
to its special functions. In the sphere of the causal we 
called the special parts the mental processes. In a 
purposive world there is no room for processes, as they 



THE SOUL 309 

refer to objects. "We ought to speak of experiences, as 
this term indicates better that every phase is related to a 
subject. We may now turn to the special experiences of 
the soul, separating again the individual and the social 
aspects. 



PART II. THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES 

CHAPTER XXIII 
MEANING 

Meaning in Practical Life. — The discussion of imme- 
diate experience and of the soul has brought us into the 
neighborhood of philosophic problems and this might easily 
reenforce the idea that the purposive mind is something 
vague, intangible and fictitious. The mind, as causal 
psychology describes it, appears concrete, real, and there- 
fore practical, but the purposive acts which are^not even 
linked with particular brain states seem to lie outside of 
all true experience, like some higher, spiritual energy, 
which can be reached by intuition only. But this is a 
complete misunderstanding. Nothing ie more real, and 
nothing comes nearer to our actual life than the purposive 
aspect of our own mind and of those of our friends. In 
actual intercourse we do not doubt it, and only when we 
come to theorize we suddenly fancy that only the things 
which can be handled are real. We have gone so thor- 
oughly into the school of natural science that we have 
almost lost confidence in the reality of everything which 
cannot be found among the objects. 

But we need only the simplest practical experiment. We 
need only to exchange a word with our neighbor : he may 
say, ' ' good morning, ' ' and I answer, ' ' how do you do. ' ' His 
words and my words have meaning for me long before I can 
think of his or my content of consciousness. But we might 
make a much more objective test. Through five thousand 

310 



MEANING 311 

years the literature of the ivorld has been filled with the 
story of the human mind. Histories have told us about 
the struggles of mankind, thousands of biographies and 
autobiographies lie before us, hundreds of thousands of 
aphorisms and epigrams, verses and proverbs, have thrown 
light on the subtle thoughts and emotions of men and 
women; and yet, if we sift this inexhaustible supply of 
observations, we find hardly one contribution to causal 
psychology in a hundred contributions to purposive 
psychology. 

We may open a political paper or an economic treatise, 
a discussion on the trivial questions of the day or on the 
great issues of the parties, and we will find man's ideas 
and wishes, feelings and judgments, treated exclusively as 
acts which have a meaning for the self which experiences 
them, but not at all as contents of consciousness. They 
are interpreted, and secondarily appreciated or criticized, 
but they- are not described as complexes of sensations or 
explained from underlying brain processes. The reader 
who wants to understand what one or another political can- 
didate has in his mind asks for a mental reality which 
is completely understood as soon as its meaning is grasped, 
while nothing significant would be added, if the ideas of 
the politician were resolved into their mental atoms or 
explained scientifically from their Causes. There is noth- 
ing to be explained in them, because our political interest 
in them refers to their inner life from a point of view from 
which we understand all as soon as we interpret it. 

This aspect of inner life is also the only one which in- 
terests the novelist. The persons whom he delineates are 
never described as scientific phenomena, but set before our 
imagination as selves whose inner actions we are to under- 
stand by entering into their meaning. "Whenever the 
author begins to describe the inner states of his hero in the 
manner of the causal psychologist and to explain his inten- 
tions from associative mental and psychophysiological 



312 PSYCHOLOGY 

causes, his ambition for realism carries him beyond the 
limits of true fiction. It is a characteristic fact that no state 
of mind has been so often depicted in literature as that of 
love between man and woman, and that nevertheless the 
causal psychologist has as yet hardly touched this problem 
of love emotion. The explanatory study of it has only 
begun. What the poets celebrate is always love as a pur- 
posive act of the soul. The literary critic, too, who speaks 
of the psychological truth of the drama on the stage has in 
mind not the correctness of psychological description or 
explanation, but the genuineness and lifelike reality of 
the personal intentions of the characters. In short, mental 
life as the meaning of selves is not something more remote 
than the psychophysical phenomena: on the contrary, it is 
the most concrete, most immediate and most personal ma- 
terial which life offers to us. 

Problems and Methods. — If we turn to the results 
which a thorough study and scholarly treatment of this 
material have yielded so far, they seem in pitiful contrast 
to the claims on which we have insisted. We called it not 
only the most immediate and most natural experience, but 
also the most significant way of looking on man. To treat 
man as an object, as causal psychology must always do, is 
much less important than to acknowledge him as a subject 
and to understand his meaning. But almost every 
scholarly effort has served so far the upbuilding of causal 
psychology. In earlier periods the interest in the human 
mind was essentially under the control of philosophy. The 
nature of the soul was the object of the discussion, while 
the study of the detailed mental facts had not come into 
its rights. The human ideas, emotions and actions were 
studied more from the point of view of logic, ethics, 
esthetics and metaphysics than from that of an original 
interest in the functions of the individual. On the other 
hand, when this new endeavor to study the special facts 
of the mind awoke, the natural sciences were at the height 



MEANING 313 

of their success, and their suggestive power forced the nat- 
uralistic method on the empirical psychologists. The study 
of mental, details at once became the studj^ of the mind 
from a causal point of view, and all the experimental 
schemes were made subservient to the explanatory atti- 
tude. The abundance of new discoveries along this line 
held the attention of the psychologists. So it happened 
that the other possible direction to detailed analysis became 
almost entirely neglected. It is true that even the ex- 
perimental work sometimes slipped into this other groove. 
Especially in the study of thought, judgment and apper- 
ception the experiments which were intended to seek ob- 
jective description and explanation unintentionally raised 
the more natural question of inner meaning and purposive 
interconnection of the acts.' But on such chance occasions 
the changing of the point of view leads only to confusion 
and to unjustified mixing of results. 

The situation itself does not suggest the usual neglect. 
The careful research with all the aid of experimental and 
comparative methods may just as well be devoted to the 
purposive aspect of mental life. Laboratory work in this 
line would have an entirely different starting point, and 
would not be concerned at all with sensations, but would 
probably begin where the causal psychologists have ended, 
with the analj^sis of thoughts and emotions. This science 
of the purposive behavior of the soul may bring together 
in future just as many special facts as our handbooks of 
causal psychology can marshal to-da}^ At present it would 
be a vain undertaking to present even in outline the facts 
of purposive psychology. AYe shall, therefore, confine our- 
selves to a statement of the problems and their bearing. 

Like causal psychology, which deals with the elementary 
contents and leads from there to the associations and re- 
actions, and finally to the connection of the individuals in 
the social organism, purposive psychology, too, ought to 
begin with the elements and build up the totality of cul- 



314 PSYCHOLOGY 

tural life. But the element is here certainly not a sensa- 
tion; the element is the simplest act which cannot be re- 
solved any further into still more elementary purposive 
activities. The indivisible acts of liking or disliking, af- 
firming or denying, selecting or avoiding, believing or dis- 
trusting, each understood as a meaning, constitute the ex- 
perience of the self. We then have to ask how they are 
connected and what they create. 

Every reminiscence of causal ideas must be excluded. 
The connection and creation are themselves strictly pur- 
posive. One act links itself to another by its meaning, 
and in the creation acts are internally combined in a new 
act of wider significance. The analysis and discrimina- 
tion of all possible single acts, the whole variety of pos- 
sible interconnections and the whole manifoldness of new 
creations form the substance of the individual soul 
psychology. At this point begins the purposive social 
interrelation of various selves. This social part in an ideal 
purposive psychology plays a much larger role than in 
causal psychology. The social connection of the indi- 
viduals is, from a causal point of view, rather secondary. 
The chief interest is naturally directed to the study of 
the individual. From the point of view of purposive 
psychology the relation of one individual to another ap- 
pears much more in the foreground. The sensations and 
their associative combinations in man can be conceived 
without any reference to other psychophysical organisms. 
But the meaning, even of the most elementary act, leads 
almost necessarily to other individuals who are expected 
to understand it. The purposive man is, first of all, a 
member of a purposive community. The psychological 
analysis of these interrelations from man to man must 
begin with the act of understanding a self, and must then 
examine all the other practical relations which build up 
the historical and cultural community. It must finally 
lead to the study of the ideal acts which the individual 



MEANING 315 

performs, not with reference to one or another chance per- 
son, but to the totality of possible individuals who share 
with him the ideal of building up a valid world of truth 
and beauty and morality. 

The Pointing to an Opposite. — The first step ought to 
be a characterization of the acts themselves. We cannot 
be expected to describe them, as that would make them ob- 
jects. We should become disloyal to our purposive task. 
But we can emphasize a characteristic contrast between 
every act and every mere content of consciousness. An 
act ahvays points to its opposite; a content of conscious- 
ness never has an opposite. This difference is ultimately 
that between subject and object. As long as we move in 
the compass of causal psychology we can arrange a series, 
for instance, from the highest to the lowest tone, and can 
call the two ends opposites, but it is evident that the high 
tone contains in itself no opposition to the low tone. Even 
the case of the feelings is not different. We can form 
a series from the strongest pleasure to the strongest dis- 
pleasure, and this series leads through a point of indiffer- 
ence, a feeling of neutrality. But this mere passing 
through a neutrality zone does not transform the two end 
groups of the series into opponents. Pleasure and dis- 
pleasure as contents of consciousness are not more op- 
posed than warm and cold. The series of temperature 
sensations which lie between these two end points also leads 
through an indifference point. 

Even the volitions, considered as mental phenomena, are 
simply existing facts of which we become conscious, but 
which do not point beyond themselves and therefore can- 
not point to any opposite volition. Wishing and declining 
are two mental states which simply exist and play a cer- 
tain role in the chain of psychophysical events but are in 
themselves not antithetic. We saw that the causal psychol- 
ogist is nevertheless able to introduce an element of opposi- 
tion into his account of the feelings and will acts. He links 



316 PSYCHOLOGY 

them with the motor processes of the brain which may 
be antagonistic to each other, inasmuch as the impulse to 
one action inhibits and prevents the impulse to certain 
other actions. But even that surely is not a real inner 
contrast. It is nothing but an interference of results. 

On the other side we cannot imagine a purposive act 
the meaning of which is not a negation of an opposite pur- 
pose. As a mental phenomenon our dislike is as complete 
in itself as the color blue or green: as an act our dis- 
like is the protest against the liking. It refuses the liking 
and rejects it, as the liking repudiates the disliking. If 
we affirm a judgment, we object to its denial, and if in a 
negative judgment we refuse the acknowledgment of its 
content, by that we turn against the affirmation. Our 
love shuts off our hate, and our hate banishes our love. 

There may be complex states in which hate and love to- 
ward the same person are combined, but then one aspect is 
loved and another is hated. In the same way we may find 
ourselves in a complex subtle state in which we will an end 
and yet do not will it. But here, too, our will and our 
opposition do not really refer to the same goal. As far as 
the same end is concerned, we may fluctuate between will- 
ing and not willing it, but in the act in which we will it 
we intentionally object to the not willing and vice versa. 
The inner antagonistic relation to an opposite is the one 
fundamental trait which characterizes every particle of the 
material of purposive psychology. 

The Affirmation of Sameness. — We may further charac- 
terize the act as the establishing of a relation of sameness 
between two objects of experience. The connection which 
the act creates is accordingly not a relation between the 
self and his object. The self does not exist outside of 
the act itself. In acting, in establishing the relation be- 
tween two objects, we know our self. The acting is the 
self, and the self posits its reality in the act. If the rela- 
tion were one between the self and the object, the self 



MEANING 317 

would be falsified into an object like a substance which 
has the same kind of existence which a thing has. The 
self consists of the acts, and the acts are the setting of a 
relation of sameness between two objects. 

Let us think of the simplest case, the perception. But 
let us exclude entirely every reminiscence of physiological 
psychology. If we speak the language of immediate ex- 
perience, a perception is the act by which we establish a 
relation of sameness between an object given to us as in- 
dividuals and an object which is independent of any par- 
ticular individual, which means that it is a part of the 
real physical world. The act of perception stands in con- 
trast, for instance, to an act of imagination in which our 
individual object is not related to an independent physical 
world, but where an entirely different relation of sameness 
is established for it, the relation to a world of satisfaction. 
Every act of perception is a belief which would be mean- 
ingless without this possible relation of our personal ob- 
ject to an object which lies beyond us, the overpersonal, 
real thing. 

In the act of memory we create such a relation of same- 
ness between the object before us and the real object of 
the past. In our conceptions as a first step we establish 
such an equation between words and essential elements 
of the perceived or remembered or imagined realities. In 
our formulated judgments we posit such a relation between 
words and relations of objects. In our desires and voli- 
tions we demand the sameness of an anticipated end and 
its realization. In our feeling of pleasure or displeasure the 
present object is related to its continuation or discontinua- 
tion. In our attention the object of one act is held to 
be the identical object of the next act. And in every one 
of these cases the real meaning of the act is that we insist 
on this relation of sameness. We grasp an act of the soul 
by imitating internally the affirmation or denial of this 
relation of identity. 



318 PSYCHOLOGY 

We have spoken here of objects between which the acts estab- 
lish relations. But this again must not be coiistrued as if those 
objects were the mental contents of the causal psychologist and 
of the physicist. The objects which the psychological or the 
physical scientist knows are simply objects of awareness, en- 
tirely detached from any subjective will act, independent of 
subjective attitude. The objectivity of their existence lies in their 
freedom from the will of the subject. But the objects of which 
we speak in the system of purposive psychology are those which 
we know from our immediate life experience in which nothing 
can be detached from our will, because we are never merely 
passive spectators, but are always active and attentive and selec- 
tive. The objects in our real world are our means and our 
goals. We have to do here only with liked and disliked, with 
fit and unfit objects; we select them or we reject them, we attend 
to them or we disregard them, we leave them unchanged, or we 
transform them, but we are never simply aware of them. 

Moreover these objects are never in ourselves. We traced the 
process by which the causal psychologist must treat the individual 
objects as if they were contained in the individual himself. 
Those ideas are packed into the mind to be contents of man's 
individual consciousness, because in the causal world the whole 
psychophysical organism is the individual which is contrasted 
with the world. For purposive psychology this would be mean- 
ingless. The self is never anything but this act of affirming the 
relations. All the objects between which the relations are estab- 
lished are only material for the self, but can never be contained 
in it. To ask where those individual objects to which the self 
refers exist is an illogical question, because we have recognized 
thftt the relation between the purposive self and its objects is not 
one which refers to space. It is a question of meaning and 
purpose only, and every question as to the where or the when 
or the why in the causal sense is a concession to the interests 
in natural science. A true purposive psychology moves in a 
dimension in which such a naturalistic question is meaning- 
less. 

From a purposive point of view the objects are never a part 
of the mental life. They are merely the material to which the 
mental life refers. As soon as the objects are inclosed in the 



MEANING 319 

purposive system the standpoint of the empirical subject is left 
and that of the absolute subject is substituted. The subject 
who has the objects of its purposes in itself is a world soul, but 
no longer an indi\ddual man. Psychology speaks of the life of 
the individual. The objects which are its means and aims, the 
things and the symbols to be used are not in the subject but are 
only used or rejected. The acts which affirm and deny the rela- 
tions are the only contents of selfhood. 

Each act establishes an equation between two objects. 
The two sides of the equation are expressed in different 
contents, but as a mathematical equation expresses the 
sameness of the two sides in quantities, the act of the 
soul establishes the sameness of two objects in vital con- 
cerns. If I remember a landscape, the idea of the land- 
scape of which the causal psychologist makes so much does 
not exist as a content of the purposive soul at all. I do 
not remember a landscape in myself. My act takes hold 
of that landscape, and the real function of my soul is the 
belief that the landscape as I grasp it is identical with the 
landscape through which I traveled in my childhood days. 
If I form a judgment, the content judged upon is not in 
myself. My act is the affirmation of the judgment by 
which I posit the sameness of the situation as I grasp it 
and the objective world which demands my action. "Wher- 
ever the soul is at work it claims that one content is the 
same or is not the same as another. 

This actual proceeding from one to the other is what 
gives to the acts of the soul their purposive character 
and at the same time the reference to an opposite. From 
the standpoint of objective observation those contents alone 
can be found, and that real act disappears, because it can 
never be an object. If we look into a photographic camera 
we see the scenery projected on the ground glass, and 
everything lies side by side in the flat picture. But if a 
light point outside in the Avorld moved toward our camera 
or away from it, we should be unable to see the change 



320 PSYCHOLOGY 

of distance on our ground glass. It can picture for us only 
that which is spread from left to right, but it cannot give 
us that other dimension in which something may move 
from a near to a distant point. The causal psychologist 
describes to us all which can be found on the ground glass : 
the purposive psychologist is interested only in that which 
moves in the other dimension toward the real objects of 
life. 

In causal psychology we found a formula which covers 
all volition processes. We saw that every time the percep- 
tion of the end is anticipated by the idea of the end. In 
other words, the causal psychologist also characterizes the 
intentional processes by a certain sameness of two contents. 
But as he lacks the possibility of characterizing that inner 
relation, he cannot do otherwise than to describe them as 
two successive contents of consciousness externally con- 
nected by sensations of bodily movements. The purposive 
psychologist reestablishes the inner relation. The will is 
the energy to make the two one. Here the idea does not 
precede its realization, but it points to it. Their same- 
ness is affirmed: that alone is the act of the soul, and no 
act of the soul is anything but such a will activity which 
insists on the sameness of two contents or denies it. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

CREATION 

Analysis of Purposes. — The first step in purposive psy- 
chology is to analyze the tissue of purposive life into its 
elementary acts. We cannot emphasize too much that 
while the theory sounds abstract and very remote from 
reality to those to whom the natural sciences alone unveil 
reality, these purposive acts are the most familiar experi- 
ences which we know. We must always begin with such 
an analysis where we want to understand an individual. 
To be sure, the w^ork of the causal and of the purposive 
psychologist may move along parallel for a time. Both 
the efforts to describe and to understand demand a resolv- 
ing of the complex. But as soon as the first chief dis- 
tinctions of characteristic emotions and volitions and 
thoughts are secured the two must go entirely different 
ways. 

If the economist analyzes a captain of industry, he 
speaks essentially in purposive terms when he traces his 
love of comfort, his desire for distinction, his impulse to 
activity, his passion for power and mastery, and so on. 
Every one of these desires can be understood as an act 
which has a meaning, and can also be considered as a 
psychophysical setting. But if the analysis is carried fur- 
ther it will lead to entirely different elements in the two 
directions. The causal psychologist would analyze that 
desire for comfort into images composed of reproduced 
sensations, into kinesthetic sensations, into feeling sensa- 
tions, into facilitations of certain associations and their 

321 



322 PSYCHOLOGY 

psychophysical processes. The purposive psychologist 
would analyze the desire for comfort into desires for a 
beautiful house and luxuries, for travel and recreation. In 
short, the one would seek atomistic contents of conscious- 
ness and the other simpler and simpler purposive acts. 

But this splitting of the personality into smaller and 
smaller groups of independent purposive acts is not suf- 
ficient for the understanding of the inner life. The ex- 
periences of the personality are not a mere sum of detached 
acts; but the deepest meaning of the individual lies in 
those acts which hind two other acts together and thus es- 
tablish a\ relation not between the objects of the soul, but 
between its own functions. The one act is affirmed to mean 
the same which the other means, and this affirmation is a 
new act establishing sameness. In the analysis to which 
we just referred the desire for comfort and the desire for 
activity may be considered as two independent purposive 
functions. But when we divided the first, the desire for 
an ample house is not independent of the desire for com- 
fort, but is partially identical with it. Willing the one 
involves willing the other. In the same way the longing 
for activity and for comfort are both involved in the de- 
sire for economic success. 

In our intellectual experiences we establish such a 
purposive connection between our acts of judgment. It 
makes no difference whether our thought proceeds from 
the judgments concerning single facts to general state- 
ments or from general statements to particular judgments. 
Each judgment and each statement is an act of acceptance 
and belief in reality, and our experience in thinking is 
the affirmation of the sameness of these various acts. The 
scientist and the philosopher alike bind their acts together 
by establishing identities between their various doings. 

The whole experience of our self consciousness in the 
field of purposive psychology is exactly this ability to posit 
the identity of various acts of ours. We feel the unity of 



CEEATION 323 

our self not as something which lies outside of the acts, 
but in the interrelation of the acts. The act which affirms 
the sameness of two other acts binds these together and at 
the same time establishes the unity of the self. Every de- 
velopment of thoughts or volitions contains, therefore, the 
purposive knowledge of our self. The selfconsciousness is 
thus clearly to be distinguished from the idea of the soul. 
We know ourselves in the actual affirmation of the same- 
ness or the non-sameness of several acts of ours. But we 
do not know our soul. We postulated a soul as a system 
of potential acts which become realized in the concrete acts 
of the individual. But this soul was a construction for 
theoretical purposes. The psychologist, not the self, de- 
manded it. It is needed in order to understand the arising 
of the particular acts, but it was not found in the indi- 
vidual experience. It guarantees to the purposive subject 
himself continuity in the stream of personal experience. 

The Freedom of the Will. — The purposive connection 
of the acts of the soul not only binds the inner experiences, 
but makes them agents of free creation. Creation and 
freedom, indeed, belong together. A mere mental mech- 
anism cannot be free and cannot create anything, but can 
only produce certain effects. Let us first trace the problem 
of freedom. AYe have touched it in causal psychology, but 
only the contrast with purposive psychology sets it right. 
We speak of freedom in the midst of a causal system of 
psychology, too. What does it mean there ? It certainly can- 
not mean an exemption from causality. Every process of 
thought or will must be completely explainable from its 
causes. The scientist claims that not because he sees him- 
self so near to the fulfillment of this demand, but because 
it is the proposition with which he starts. 

Yet he is not obliged entirely to dispense with the con- 
ception of freedom on the basis of his causal system. He 
calls those acts free which result from the normal coopera- 
tion of all parts of the psychophysical system. If this 



324 PSYCHOLOGY 

system is disturbed and part of the mechanism out of 
order, the individual has lost his freedom of decision. 
The insane, the drunken, the hypnotized man is not free. 
The discrimination is not based on the fact that an action 
is produced by the actor himself. The insane man also 
acts from his own motives, and the drunken man, too. Yet 
they lack freedom because in the one case some brain cells 
may be overexcited and produce an irresistible impulse, 
and in the other case brain parts may be paralyzed and 
inefficient in producing the normal inhibition. Under such 
conditions the individual is not responsible, because the ac- 
tion is not really the product of his whole mind brain 
system, in which the earlier experiences are still influential. 
The freedom of an action, accordingly, is the absence of 
interference in the interplay of the psychophysical ap- 
paratus. 

This conception has its significant practical importance, 
but it certainly has no reference to that freedom which 
gives meaning and value to our true purposive life. If 
we feel ourselves as free actors in our thoughts and de- 
cisions, in our feelings and beliefs, we certainly do not 
understand by this that the inner action is a necessary out- 
come of undisturbed brain processes. As soon as our de- 
cision is artificially forced into the time-space-causality 
scheme, the question can be only which causal connections 
constitute the free action. But if we take life as we live it, 
the free act is free because it has no causes. Only this car- 
ries with it the real meaning of respo7isihility. 

The judge can easily treat the criminal as a psycho- 
physical mechanism, and yet feel justified in punishing 
him. He will be put into jail for his assault, first because 
the punishment will be perceived by others and may have 
an inhibitory influence on the criminal impulses of other 
degenerates. Secondly, he may be punished because his 
suffering from the punishment may establish associations 
by which he himself will shrink from a new violation of 



CEEATION 325 

law in future. Thirdly, he may be trained to useful be- 
havior in jail. And, lastly, he will be separated by the 
prison walls from possible victims. These causal arguments 
justify a punishment ; and yet if the thought which 
lies at the bottom is followed further, justice, responsi- 
bility and punishment in their moral sense, have vanished. 
The criminal's so-called free acts are to the causal psychol- 
ogist necessary products of the inborn disposition of the 
nervous sj^stem and of the totality of influences from the 
surroundings. The nervous system determines the par- 
ticular reaction. The violation of the law was the product 
of the individual, but the individual was the product of 
his ancestors and of the surrounding community. The mis- 
deed was thus no different from a mental disturbance, and 
the prisons are nothing but asylums. A society which ac- 
cepted this view consistently would give up the idea of 
justice and responsibility, together with the idea of non- 
causal freedom. 

The purposive psychologist alone can remain entirely 
loyal to man's immediate conviction that his act is com- 
plete in itself and does not refer back to causes which de- 
termine it. To raise the question of causes would shift 
the center of interest or would be meaningless as long as 
the interest remains the desire to understand the purpose 
of the act. Every act is to the outsider an appeal to grasp 
its meaning, and to the experiencing subject a decision to 
remain loyal to this meaning. It is an appeal and it is an 
approval; and neither approvals nor appeals can be en- 
riched by an effort to link them with causes. It is, 
therefore, entirely misleading when popular philosophers 
not seldom claim freedom for the purposive deeds of 
the mind with the argument that the causes are too 
complex to be traced or too subtle to be discovered. That 
would be a freedom which is based on ignorance or lazi- 
ness, and which would be shaken by every new scientific 
discovery of the working causes. A wave of the ocean is 



326 PSYCHOLOGY 

just as much determined by causes as the rippling of the 
pond into which we throw a stone. The mere complexity 
of the causes and our inability to trace the detailed causes 
of the midocean wave make no difference. The real acts 
of the human soul do not have obscure causes, but they 
have no causes at all, because they consist only of a 
reality which is completely understood when its meaning 
is grasped. 

The act as such, therefore, has no effects either. The 
external results of our free actions are first of all bodily 
expressions and only those expressions become physical 
causes of physical effects. My will to open the book does 
not open the book. It is my finger movement which opens 
the book, and this finger movement is not the effect, but the 
expression of my will. I may have an interest in consid- 
ering that finger movement as a part of the physical proc- 
esses in the world, and in that case I can trace it back in 
the causal series and can find that my finger movement 
which turns the cover of the book w^as caused by a process 
in the cortex of the brain, and I may then correlate my 
will as a process to this cortex excitation. But then I have 
taken an entirely different starting point and have given 
up the interest in the will as a meaning. As long as the 
will is a meaning to me, its bodily expression is a mean- 
ing, too, and from the standpoint of this purposive will 
even the opening of the book is not a mechanical effect of 
the muscle contraction, but the aim of the act. 

The Creative Power. — While the act as a purposive 
meaning cannot have effects, it has and must have inner 
consequences. Whatever decision enters our soul joins 
many others and their relations themselves become the con- 
tents of new acts. Tlie resulting total act is therefore far 
more than the mere sum of the single acts. It is something 
entirely new : it is a creation. Our whole inner life is creat- 
ing richer and richer acts unceasingly. In the causal uni- 
verse not only in the physical but also in the psycho- 



CKEATION 327 

physical system the law of the conservation of energy is' 
paramount: in the purposive world of our soul the mean- 
ing grows like an avalanche. From a few propositions, 
we may deduce a theory of widest compass ; from a feeling 
tone we may develop a beautiful work of literature; from 
one vital practical decision we may reach the decision for 
a thousand details; from one act of perception we may 
come to grasp the reality of a most complex situation. In 
every one of such unlike practical cases the possibility for 
all the accessory acts must have been potentially in our soul. 
The feeling tone in itself did not contain the drama in 
which it unfurls itself. The ideas, the memories, the 
knowledge, the interests, which are exhibited in the scenes 
of the drama must have been a possession of the soul, but 
the meaning of that one intense feeling brought them to- 
gether into a perfectly new reality. 

Our whole life is such a continuous creation. In our life 
reality we know no more of the soul which the purposive 
psychologist demands than of the brain to which the causal 
psychologist refers. The genuine experience is this free 
creation itself which in every sphere of interests reaches 
higher and higher acts. Modern philosophy, since the days 
of Fichte and Schopenhauer, has never lost sight of this 
fundamental fact that the true reality of our life lies in 
our free creative will and that the thought forms in which 
this world of will appears as a causal universe are the 
creative evolution of the will itself. In our genera- 
tion this thought of idealism has found many a scintil- 
lating expression; and everywhere this creed of the free 
creative subject is in the ascendancy. It does not con- 
tradict the zigzag tendencies of naturalism, pragmatism, 
realism or neo-realism, which appeal and always have ap- 
pealed to various onesided interests of man. They all ex- 
press partial truths, and as such they are included in and 
affirmed by idealistic philosophy. Man's free creative will 
is the rockbed of reality. 



328 PSYCHOLOGY 

The doctrine of man's freedom not only leaves room 
for many fragmentary philosophical views of knowledge, 
but also for a naturalistic psychology. The scientific truth 
of a causal study of mind is nowhere interfered with by 
the recognition of the free purposive act as the condition 
of every thought. This is indeed the one great conquest of 
our own time as against the idealistic philosophy of a 
hundred years ago. The thinkers of that time recognized 
the dependence of causal physics upon the creative action of 
the soul. They saw that the world as nature was dependent 
upon forms which were needed for the purposes of the 
free subjects, but nature to them meant only the physical 
world. Since that time the natural science of psychology 
has grown up. Through a century of physiological 
psychology we have learned to master the mind as a causal 
system. It was the task of the idealistic philosophy of 
our day to recognize that mind seen as nature, like the 
phj^sical world, stands under thought forms which are de- 
pendent upon purposive acts. This involved the new de- 
mand of idealism, foreign to philosophical thought before 
the last two decades, that two distinct accounts of inner 
life be recognized, causal and purposive. The naturalistic, 
causal view of mental life is true, but its truth is a con- 
struction needed by the purposive mind in its creative un- 
folding. But the full vista of this truth-creating act opens 
only when the purposive mind is not considered in its 
isolation, but in its internal relation to other individuals. 



PAET III. THE SOCIAL EXPERIENCES 

CHAPTER XXV 
PRACTICAL RELATIONS 

Understanding. — The elementary social relation be- 
tween soul and soul is the act of understanding. AVe know 
that our interest here is not concerned with the causal 
problem of the transmission from one man to another. To 
the purposive psychologist it makes no difference whether 
one speaks and the other hears, or one writes and the other 
reads, one cables and the other receives the cablegram, one 
writes five centuries before Christ and the other reads 
twenty-five centuries later. The real act of understanding 
consists of two elements. We perform the same act w^hich 
another performed, experiencing its full meaning; and 
yet at the same time we refer this act of ourselves to the 
self of the other. The soul of another man is to us an 
interrelated system of such acts of meaning which we un- 
derstand, but which we grasp as acts not our own. 

To be sure, in understanding our neighbor's acts we 
must think of the world from the point of view of his 
body. The place and time of his organism with its sense 
organs and its muscles determine the selection of things 
toward which he takes his attitude. But these attitudes 
in their genuine purposiveness constitute the personality 
which we try to understand. In absorbing those acts, in 
sharing their meaning, we nowhere leave the strictly pur- 
posive system: the other men do not become objects to us, 
and their functions are neither causes nor effects. The 

329 



330 PSYCHOLOGY 

objects remain, to them as to us the material for attitude. 
They are things to be used or to be rejected, real only as 
material for the purposive subject. The world which con- 
sists of our fellowmen is not a fragment of the outer 
world; it is an independent, genuine world which we un- 
derstand in performing our purposive acts of emotional, 
intellectual and practical apprehension. We understand 
the pain and joy, the remembrance and thought, the plan 
and decision and deed of our fellowman. 

The inner experience becomes much more complex, if a 
new act of ours builds a new purposive superstructure and 
affirms or denies a relation of sameness between our own 
attitude and that attitude of ours which we refer to the 
other man. Then we come to the act of sympathy or lack 
of sympathy with his feelings, of agreement or disagree- 
ment with his thoughts, of willingness or unwillingness to 
accept his decisions. From this starting point the pur- 
posive psychologist has to trace all the complex emotional 
organizations of acts which refer to acts which are them- 
selves related to acts. Gratitude and envy, friendship and 
hatred, pity and fear, desire for social honor and con- 
descension, trust and distrust, love and disgust, are such 
systems of acts, which can be understood only if it is ac- 
knowledged that every act points beyond itself and that 
every meaning binds one experience to another. They 
can be grasped only by disentangling the subtle acts which 
enter with their reference to acts in the world of fellow- 
beings. Nothing whatever can be gained for this true un- 
derstanding by any explanation. They have meaning, not 
causes. 

Interpretation. — Another large group of purposive 
structures which grows from the simple understanding of 
the fellow-being comprises the acts of interpretation. Their 
aim is to develop the meanings which are involved in the 
purposive acts of another. The feeling of the crying child 
is easily understood. The expression of the child's 



PEACTICAL RELATIONS 331 

thought may need some interpretation, as we may 
misunderstand his true motives and purposes. The 
thought of the politician may need much more complex in- 
terpretation, as his words may not directly suggest every- 
thing which is in his mind. The interpretation of a poem 
may bring to our mind feeling acts of the poet which he 
has not expressed by the meaning of the words, but by 
the choice of the sounds, by the rhythm, by the rhyme. But 
the interpretation may entirely abstract from the acts of 
the individual who expressed himself and may unfold the 
meaning of the expression with reference to any subject 
who apprehends the act. The lawyer interprets a law 
without necessarily grasping those intentions which the 
originator of the law had in mind, and the philologist in- 
terprets a work of literature without necessary reference 
to the writer's own purposes. A scientific theory stands 
before the world and demands interpretation quite inde- 
pendent of the aims of the thinker who created it. Finally, 
every step in the interpretation of acts of others may 
lead to the grasping of intentions which allow new acts 
of agreement or disagreement, of approval or disapproval, 
of sympathy or antipathy. 

Social Intercourse. — The psychology of understanding 
and of agreement or disagreement is the psychology of the 
elementary social experiences. Their combinations and de- 
velopments lead to the manifoldness of practical inter- 
course, of cooperation and antagonism in every field of 
human interest. The submission and aggression, the sub- 
ordination and superordination, the organization and di- 
vision of activity can be traced, just as in causal social 
psychology; and yet everything has here an entirely dif- 
ferent significance. No physiological changes and no reac- 
tions and no mental processes as effects of such influences 
are any longer in question. Will reaches out to will, pur- 
pose joins purpose, subjects help and hinder subjects. 

Of course practical life may create situations where the 



332 PSYCHOLOGY 

submission of another man or his aggressiveness cannot be 
understood as an expression of his soul. We do not grasp 
it by entering into its meaning. We therefore seek its 
causes and we may find them in a disturbance of his brain 
which stirs up the aggressive emotion or in the hypnotic 
state which causes the submission. But in such a case we 
have really left the purposive world. The other individual 
is no longer a subject to us, and has become an object. The 
act of the insane person does not appeal to our under- 
standing, but to our effort to treat the patient and accord- 
ingly to explain the abnormal process. The conceptions of 
purposive psychology cannot have value beyond the world 
in which the meaning of subjects is expressed. The buyer 
and seller in the market, the teacher and pupil in school, 
the judge and criminal in court, the employer and work- 
man in the factory stand fundamentally in this subject to 
subject relation. It is theoretically possible to give a full 
account of all mental acts involved in their dealings with- 
out leaving the path of interpretation. 

The total report of the business transaction or of a class- 
room hour, of a legal trial or of a technical discussion, of a 
political gathering or of a religious Gevemony, can be much 
more accurately given in these terms of understanding and 
agreement than in any descriptions of causal psychology. 
This description, if it were carried out with ideal perfec- 
tion, would also leave no particle of the transactions unac- 
counted for. The millions of psychophysical processes 
would finally cover every subtle thought and feeling. But 
the decisive difference would be that in this causal de- 
scription the processes would be analyzed into elements 
which were never experienced as such, and that the di- 
visions and the combinations would be controlled by ex- 
planatory interests entirely foreign to the experiencing 
subjects of those practical events. The purposive psychol- 
ogist might need just as many elements in tracing the 
subtlest meaning and intention in all the acts which are 



PEACTICAL EELATIONS 333 

held together in the participating souls. But his whole 
analysis would remain in immediate contact with life it- 
self. He would resolve the complex intention into partial 
intentions which were really felt by the subject, however 
little they may have come to isolated apprehension. His 
analysis would move in the dimension of life and his com- 
binations would be controlled by comprehensive acts of the 
subjects themselves. 

This is the reason why the historian must speak the 
language of purposive psychology, if he grasps the true 
humanistic meaning of historic life. It is certainly inter- 
esting to bring the development of mankind, from savage 
life to the highest differentiation of to-day, into the thought 
forms of natural science and to explain the actions of the 
leaders and of the masses from a biological point of view. 
But however subtle the dissections of the causal psychol- 
ogist may be, the spark of the historic spirit is extin- 
guished. The life of history, political as well as cultural, 
must be understood as the purposive influence of souls on 
one another. The mere fact that events have occurred 
does not raise them into the realm of history. We may 
speak of the history of the stellar system or of the earth 
or of the plant life on its surface, but in a deeper sense 
they have no history, as long as we do not interpret them 
by a bold philosophy of nature as the unfolding of a world 
of meaning. The physical objects are in the eyes of the 
true historian only the means of help and of resistance 
to the purposes of the subjects. Even where natural events 
intrude into the historical interplay, the real historic sig- 
nificance lies in the change of attitude of the subjects. In 
short, they, too, must be understood with reference to their 
importance for a world of meaning. The whole economic, 
political and cultural stream of civilization flows through 
the realm of purposive reality. 

We have emphasized the purposive significance of all 
which is an external expression of meaning. The bodily 



334 PSYCHOLOGY 

movement, the gesture, the spoken, the written, the printed 
word are not physical things or physical processes, but are 
appeals for the understanding of their meaning. In a true 
historic spirit this interpretation must be carried further. 
Then the work of our minds, the tool, the instrument, the 
machine are bearers of meaning, too, and so are the fruit 
which we harvest and the house which we build. This 
reaches its widest importance when we expand the view to 
the historic institutions which hand down the traditions 
of mankind. The purposive meaning of millions is con- 
densed in school, and church, and court. The will of com- 
munities lives embodied in the flag and the hymn and in 
any symbol of historic import. 



CHAPTER XXVI 
IDEAL RELATIONS 

The Ideal Purposes. — The account of our purposive 
life is not yet completed. The soul creates its free acts as 
a response to the outer world and to the social world. 
It unfolds through them its own meaning. Whether man 
masters the things and makes them realize his individual 
purposes or whether he agrees or disagrees with, submits 
to or attacks the purposes of others, it is his personal life 
energy which binds his acts together. The one funda- 
mental will act of asserting himself enlivens every response 
of his soul. He seeks his pleasures, he escapes his dangers, 
he loves his friends, he fights his foes, he strives to learn 
and to grow: the life tendency of his personality is not 
only a will to exist and to enjoy, but to advance and to 
gain in influence. The ''will to power" has often been 
proclaimed as the formula of the individual life. The indi- 
vidual temperament decides whether it will realize itself in 
contact with others more by aggressive forms like ambition, 
courage, curiosity, stubbornness, or by the protective forms 
like anxiety, modesty, submission, greediness. Every inner 
movement is somehow directed toward selfaggrandise- 
ment or selfprotection. Whatever fulfills this demand for 
selfassertion gives satisfaction and is felt to be valuable. 
The values which one seeks may agree with the values of 
another. But his satisfaction depends upon his personal 
interest. 

The values which satisfy our personal life desires are, 
however, not the only values which we acknowledge. 

335 



336 PSYCHOLOGY 

Everybody knows satisfactions which are not related to 
the individual needs, fulfillments of demands which have 
no selfish origin. We experience purposive acts which we 
do not feel as our individual acts; and yet which we do 
not refer to other particular individuals. They are not re- 
lated to this or that neighbor, to this or that leader; they 
are not understood as expressing the desire of any other 
particular individual. We understand them as 'belonging 
to every subject whom we are to acknowledge as a sub- 
ject at all. They are our acts, but they do not express our 
individuality: they express our being subjects. 

Only in so far as we share these purposes do we become 
parts of the interpersonal community of mutual under- 
standing and mutual acknowledgment, a community with 
a common world. If we do not want to enter into this 
community with a common world, if we want to consider 
our life only as a dream, not acknowledging the reality of 
others or of a world, then we are not bound to share these 
fundamental acts. But if we want to have a world in 
common with others and if we want to understand others, 
and if we want to be understood in our subjectivity, then 
we must affirm those acts which build up a world common 
to all. The fulfillment of these demands for a common 
world must then furnish a satisfaction which lies beyond 
the mere selfish pleasure and enjoyment. Its values are 
not simply personal, but overpersonal, absolute, eternal 
values. They take the fourfold form of truth, beauty, 
morality and religion. 

The Normative Acts. — The acts which demand these logi- 
cal, esthetic, ethical and metaphysical values are our acts, 
like those which demand the personal values of safety and 
pleasure and power. Yet they spring from a deeper 
source. They serve ideal purposes. It depends upon 
our performing them whether we are true subjects at all. 
"We feel those purposive acts, therefore, as superior to our 
individual acts. We call them norms. We are not free to 



IDEAL RELATIONS 337 

will or not to will them; we are obliged to will them, if 
we will to be parts of the common interpersonal world. 
We acknowledge them as obligations and measure our indi- 
vidual acts hy these overindAvidual standards. Just as 
the objects which are common to all, the physical things, 
form the true world as against the dreams and imagina- 
tions and hallucinations of individuals, so the values which 
must be common to all form the true world of satisfaction 
as against the haphazard pleasures of the individual man. 

If I meet a man, it may be my will to ask him for ad- 
vice, or to buy something of him, or to enjoy his conversa- 
tion: all this is strictly personal. I will it without the 
least expectation that some one else may will the same. But 
if I see a man whom I do not know in mortal danger, my 
will aims to help him. The purpose of my will is now the 
saving of his life. It is my own will, and yet this time 
I do not will it for my personal ends. It is a will in me 
the aim of which has no reference to my personality, but 
to something which is of common value to everyone, the 
respect for human life. If I will to help and not to kill, 
to protect and not to steal, to speak the truth and not to 
lie, the purpose may be in conflict with my personal de- 
sires; and yet my will toward the painful sacrifice is 
stronger. 

But it is no different in the intellectual field. I seek the 
truth, and I affirm the true judgment. I say two times 
three is six, and I reject every different proposition. If 
some one suggests that two times three may be seven, I do 
not will it : it does not fulfill my purpose. Yet I will the 
true judgment not for my personal benefit, but because it 
is valuable in itself. I mean by truth nothing but such 
judgments which I will with the claim that every person 
must will them with me regardless of personal pleasure. 
The ancient Sophists tried to make the crowd believe that 
there is no truth which is valuable for all and that any 
individual may call truth whatever fits his or his neigh- 



338 PSYCHOLOGY 

bor's personal purposes. But Socrates showed for all time 
the inner contradictions of such "pragmatism." What- 
ever the Sophists pretend, they themselves want to give 
us a truth, and that means something that everyone who 
thinks at all has to accept as valuable. Hence they them- 
selves claim that some real truth exists which has more 
than merely personal meaning. Of course the possibility 
that a personal pleasure may be added to the real value 
of the truth is not excluded. I may have personal advan- 
tage from knowing certain facts, but the pleasure derived 
from my personal gain involved in the knowledge does not 
make my satisfaction in the truth as such. 

We have exactly the same case in the world of art and 
beauty. To be sure, we may have a personal pleasure in 
seeing a painting or hearing a symphony or reading a 
drama. Yet no one has understood the meaning and mis- 
sion of art who does not feel that the personal enjoyment 
does not constitute the true value of the artistic creation. 
We may just as well derive pleasure from dancing and 
feasting, from fighting and sleeping; but the enjoyment 
of the tragedy and the symphony is upheld by the con- 
viction that we are in contact with something that is more 
than our chance pleasure, something that must be valuable 
to everyone who understands the beauty of the world. 
Hence the purposive psychologist finds in every sphere of 
human life two different kinds of activity in the individual 
soul, personal acts and normative acts; and no account of 
inner life is complete which does not include the latter too. 
Yet, to analj^ze them would lead us beyond psychology; this 
is the task of the philosopher. 



BOOK III. APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY 



PART I. PRINCIPLES OF APPLIED 
PSYCHOLOGY 

CHAPTER XXVII 
THE AIM OF PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 

The Present Situation of Practical Psychology. — ^We 

take a narrow view of scientific knowledge if we claim that 
it has a right to exist only when it can serve our prac- 
tical interests and can be applied to the tasks of life. 
Truth must be respected as valuable in itself. Like beauty, 
it fulfills an ideal demand, and we ought to devote our- 
selves to the discovery of truth without asking how far 
the truth can be used to bake our daily bread. But our 
view is certainly no less narrow, if we take the opposite 
stand and are indifferent to the practical usefulness of 
our scientific results. The admirable eagerness to con- 
tribute to and to spread theoretical knowledge has often 
led to a certain unwillingness to link theoretical psychology 
with the practical needs of the community. Some have 
the feeling that psychology loses its dignity when it be- 
comes a handmaid of routine life. 

This feeling can be the more easily understood as every 
community is swarming with pseudo-psychologists who, in 
a dilettantic manner, apply a self-made popular psychology 
to the ills of society. There always were quacks, of all 
shades of sincerity, who tried to cure diseases by mental 
influences without any understanding of the laws of the 
mind. The scientists naturally shrunk from contact with 
the charlatan and the sensation seeker. The popular mind 

341- 



342 PSYCHOLOGY 

also often coupled the legal court procedure with psycho- 
logical processes. But the interest did not turn to the 
scientific psychological examination of witnesses or the 
psychological analysis of the criminal: it was essentially 
gossip about hypnotism and similar objects of popular 
curiosity. The psychologist and the lawyer alike preferred 
to avoid everything which reenforced such fantasies. Even 
^here psychology and education came in contact, the ef- 
forts were too often a product of superficiality. Half un- 
derstood psychological principles were misused by the 
public for the promotion of educational fads and the 
strengthening of educational prejudices. The wise educator 
and the psychologist alike felt unwilling to submit to such 
a clamor. This widespread unscientific psychology in many 
such fields of practical life has certainly hindered the 
progress of real applied psychology, and this difficulty is 
still by no means overcome. 

Yet while it is easy to find reasons for a certain re- 
luctance in the past, there ought to be no doubt that such 
detachment from life is no longer excusable for the 
psychology of to-day. Nobody imagines that physics and 
chemistry are desecrated by being harnessed for the tech- 
nical achievements of society. We could not imagine the 
laws of electricity or of steam power being known in the 
laboratories and not being applied for railways and 
steamers, for lighting our houses and for cabling our news. 
It is no less fitting and natural that the progress of psychol- 
ogy, too, should become helpful to the community wherever 
mental life is involved in its affairs, and it is evident that 
the m.ind takes a characteristic part in every domain of 
social interest, of education and of religion, of politics and 
of law, of commerce and of industry, of art and of scholar- 
ship, of fam_ily life and of practical intercourse, of public 
movements and of social reform. 

To be sure, the history of mankind shows that the 
greatest technical triumphs were always won through the 



THE AIM OF PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 343 

work of scientists who did not think of the practical 
achievements but exclusively of theoretical truth. The 
work of the engineer has always followed where the physical 
truth seeker has blazed the path. It cannot be otherwise 
with applied psychology. The results of psychological 
technic must remain superficial without a solid founda- 
tion of theoretical psychology, and this must be laid with- 
out any side-thought of practical usefulness. But as soon 
as such psychological knowledge is really secured, we have 
simply no right to disregard it, when the needs of society 
are so evident. 

But it may be added that the d^velopme^it of psychology 
itself favors this new trend toicavd applied psychology. 
One characteristic change in the recent interests of the 
psychologists proved of especial significance : the long 
disregard for individual differences in experimental psy- 
chology has ceased. When psychology emancipated itself 
from philosophy, the fundamental aim was to study the 
mental facts in the same way in which the naturalist 
studies the physical facts. The general emphasis, there- 
fore, was laid on the search for general laws. The mental 
curiosities and surprising happenings in individual cases 
had too long held the interest of the psychologists of pre- 
vious times. The new psychology was to get rid of this 
anecdotal kind of unscientific observation. The result was 
an instinctive suppression of all the facts which charac- 
terize the individual differences of man and an overem- 
phasis on the common laws of the mind. 

Yet it is evident that this condition works directly 
against the practical application of psychology. The 
physician, the lawyer, the educator, the minister or the 
business man who neglects the individual differences of 
the patients, witnesses, pupils, parishioners, or customers, 
loses his chief opportunity to touch the levers of the mind. 
The abstract mind, common to all, is a fiction which is 
necessary for the development of theoretical psychology, 



344 PSYCHOLOGY 

but utterly unfit for practical achievement. Since the be- 
ginning of the new century the interest of psychologists 
has shifted more and more from these general laws to the 
study of those factors which determine the individual va- 
riations. The personal characteristics which at the begin- 
ning of experimental psychology were treated more or less 
as a disturbance which only obscured the general laws are 
now the material for most careful examination. This new 
turn in the scientific theoretic interest most naturally 
brings a turn in the practical attitude. 

Moreover, the work of the psychologist has reached to- 
day a high degree of consolidation. The best interests of a 
young science demand that a certain stage of development 
be reached before the results are carried to the market- 
place. It is dangerous for the scientist, if he is disturbed 
in the quiet elaboration of his theories by impatient de- 
mands of the outer world. A few decades of seclusion be- 
hind laboratory doors was most desirable for experimental 
psychology. This first period, however, may be acknowl- 
edged to be closed. The work is at a stage at which the 
exchange between theory and practice may be helpful and 
stimulating in both directions. 

Misgivings may be eliminated the more readily, as for- 
tunately a division of labor has begun. The interest of 
the men of affairs, of the teachers, physicians, lawyers, so- 
cial reformers, in the working of the mind has been awak- 
ened and demands satisfaction. If such inquiries push 
their way into the midst of the theoretical science, they 
do indeed threaten the circles of theoretical research. As 
soon as the problems of applied psychology become an inde- 
pendent field of investigation, this disturbing tension in the 
midst of psychology will be relieved. The physiologists 
and pathologists would have to suffer too, if medicine were 
not an independent science. The scientific problems of 
technical industry, of agriculture, of engineering, of navi- 
gation, cannot be ignored; and yet they would not be 



THE AIM OF PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 345 

shifted to chemistry, physics, botany and astronomy with- 
out displacing in a most dangerous way the natural center 
of gravity of those theoretical sciences. As soon as the 
labor has been divided it can develop in both fields with- 
out restriction. The practical psychologists can then really 
adjust their questions to their own specific interests instead 
of being obliged to subordinate them to conceptions of gen- 
eral psychology and to make them a mere appendix of 
theoretical studies. 

The educator knows very well what a large role attention 
and memory and thought play in the classroom, but he is 
little aided if he simply takes the results of the laboratory 
studies in these topics and translates them into pedagogical 
schemes. What is needed is psychological research directed 
toward those problems which school life presents, just as 
the engineer does not simply use the results of the theo- 
retical physicist, but bases his practical work on techno- 
logical studies which are from the start adjusted to the en- 
gineering problems. The lawyer, too, cannot profit much 
from simply consulting general physiological psychology 
when he is interested in the memory or suggestibility or 
emotion of the witness. He must be able to fall back on 
psychological investigations which are concerned with the 
mental problems of the court. The situation is the same 
for the physician, for the manufacturer, for the reformer. 
This division of labor has just begun. Direct experi- 
mental research in educational psychology, legal psychol- 
ogy, medical psychology, industrial psychology, and so on, 
has been started, and investigations on practical problems 
fill the modern psychological laboratory side by side with 
strictly theoretical research. 

The right of the scientific psychologist to link his results with 
the technical needs of social life is founded on even deeper 
reasons than that of the physicist. We need only to remember 
our earlier discussions on the prhiciples of causal psychology. 



346 PSYCHOLOGY 

We saw that the inner life of those around us does not present 
itself as a system of causes and effects but only as a meaning- 
to be interpreted. To study it as cause and effect involved a 
reconstruction, and every causal statement was thus an answer 
to an artificial question. But why should we raise such an 
unnatural question at all, if there is no need of applying the 
results of causal psychology to important practical interests'? If 
we were concerned with theoretical insight only, we ought to be 
satisfied with a mere understanding of man, that is, with pur- 
posive psychology. The whole elaboration of causal psychology, 
and that is after all the form of psychology which is tradi- 
tionally accepted as the science of the mind, has significance only 
if it is ultimately to serve our practical ends. 

This is clear: If we are to change the world, to reform and 
to improve men, to teach them or to cure them, to make them 
perform efficient labor or to organize them for common action, 
then we must treat man as a system of causes which will pro- 
duce certain effects. We must be able to foresee what will hap- 
pen and to determine how we can mold the mind. In short, 
if we want to treat man as a means for the realization of our 
practical ends, we must have causal psychology. Through the 
practical application alone the unnatural problems of causal 
psychology become justified. The technical use of psychology 
gives real meaning to the whole great movement devoted to the 
causal study of the mind. If this end did not exist, causal 
psychology would be a scholastic attempt to solve an unnatural 
problem. 

The Limitations of Applied Psychology. — Tlie time has 
come for the acknowledgment of api)lied psychology as 
an important and valuable science, and the day is probably 
near w^hen it will be taught as such in every high insti- 
tution of learning and when it will finally control its own 
laboratory w^orkshops. But this conviction and this hope 
must not lead to any overestimation of the present 
achievements. A science which takes its first steps cannot 
be expected to lead us a long way. AYhole chapters of a 
possible applied psychology are still essentially blanks. 



THE AIM OF PKACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 347 

They will be filled the more easily the more the new science 
develops its independent methods. As long as the prac- 
tical applications are only by-products of the theoretical 
science the progress must be accidental, but as soon as 
the scientific work is immediately directed to the practical 
problems we may hope for a steady growth of the avail- 
able information. 

But a warning seems no less relevant with regard to the 
practical application itself. We are alwaj^s in danger of 
drawing wrong practical consequences from right psycho- 
logical facts. This results from the complexity of the prac- 
tical conditions. Every special case represents a complica- 
tion of many factors and we may be drawn into a harmful 
misuse of our psychological knowledge, if we focus our 
attention on one of the psychological elements and ignore 
the others. Just as the physician would be misled if he 
treated a disease with reference to an isolated symptom, 
the psychologist, too, must give his attention to the whole 
combination of elements. Not only the incompleteness and 
the possible neglect of influential factors suggests a warn- 
ing, but it would also be dangerous if psychology were ap- 
plied in a narrow spirit at the expense of other agencies. 
It must cooperate rather than dominate. Its newness and 
still more the quickness of its results suggest a certain 
superciliousness toward the older and slower methods of 
securing changes in the social world. 

In the educational field, for instance, serious hopes are 
certainly justified by applied psychology. But the develop- 
ment of the pedagogical situation shows that these hopes 
have too often turned the attention away from other no 
less important elements of school life. The educational au- 
thorities so strongly encouraged the belief that the school 
methods would be improved by the teachers' study of 
psychology that the other forward movements in pedagogy 
became somewhat neglected. There can be no doubt, how- 
ever, that no psychology and no insight into the methods 



348 PSYCHOLOGY 

of dealing with pupils can be a possible substitute for the 
first requisite, the thorough scholarship of the teacher in 
those subjects which he is to teach. Still greater is the 
harm which is threatening in the field of medicine. The 
application of psychology in the treatment of disease is of 
utmost importance, but it is inexcusable when pseudo- 
scientific movements turn directly against all official medi- 
cine and propose to treat every ailment by psychotherapy, 
eliminating drugs or surgery. 

Finally the knowledge of applied psychology must not 
he brought into any conflict with the natural instincts or 
with the trained abilities. It would be an undesirable de- 
velopment if the teaching of applied psychology should in- 
terfere with the spontaneous behavior and should force on 
us a scientific thought attitude, where life calls for a naive, 
immediate reaction. The chances are great that the psy- 
chologist may not know all the factors involved and that 
his deliberate analysis of the case and his rational calcu- 
lation of the necessary steps will spoil the chances of suc- 
cess. We walk and climb stairs without thinking of the 
physiological laws of muscle contraction. Of course a 
physiologist would be able in every case to determine which 
muscle activity would be the most effective to bring us 
upstairs, but if we should really intrust the problem to 
the physiologist in the particular case we should be the 
losers, unless exceptional conditions demanded a scientific 
treatment. We approach the need for the scientific aspect 
more closely, if we think of our eating instead of our 
walking. The choice of our food is usually left to our mere 
instinct, too. Yet it is evident that we profit greatly if 
scientific physiologists advise us what combinations of food 
are essential to keep us in good working order, and this ad- 
vice becomes indispensable in the case of illness. 

Thus we have a continuous transition from those spheres 
in which we take care of our body by relying on our natu- 
ral instincts to those spheres in which the careful scientific 



THE AIM OF PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 349 

consideration is of highest value. In the psychological 
field we find the same principle of small transitional steps 
and the absence of all sharp lines of separation. If we 
simply reflect on a problem or calculate some results or 
picture some consequences in our imagination we are no 
more concerned with the auxiliary functions necessary for 
the processes than we are in the case of walking or run- 
ning. We leave everything to the natural course of events. 
But if we try to recall something which has slipped from 
our memory or if we try to concentrate our attention or 
to discriminate some bodily sensations or to enhance an 
enjoyment, it may indeed be practical to bring our mental 
mechanism into motion with conscious consideration of the 
psychological laws. If we wish to make our perception in- 
dependent of optical illusions or if we try to bring an 
autosuggestion to its fullest effectiveness or to learn some- 
thing by heart with the least possible effort or to carry out 
a piece of mental work with the least possible fatigue, 
psychological knowledge may show us ways which mere 
instinct would be unable to find. 

It is not true that the scientific dealing with the mental 
situation is always aimed toward an elimination of the 
naive responses. On the contrary the reflective activity 
constantly prepares the way for the unreflective. We must 
not forget that those activities which are performed with- 
out reflection are seldom inborn instincts. The writing 
and piano playing at first had to be learned with much 
effort. We continually learn to connect movements with 
the help of our attention, until they are performed with- 
out reflection. In the purely psychical sphere the situation 
is the same. There, too, the conscious analyzing reflection 
leads to a mastery over the mental functions Avhich slowly 
becomes natural and apparently instinctive. The physician 
who has carefully and painstakingly studied abnormal 
mental life gradually learns to react on a pathological 
symptom in a fitting way without any conscious analysis. 



350 PSYCHOLOGY 

The so-called naive instinctive response is .usually nothing 
but an abbreviation of the conscicuG, acquired, attentive 
activity. The scientific interest is only the highest stage 
of this attention, which is directed to the parts of the 
processes; and, accordingly, there is nowhere a contra- 
diction in principle between the naive and the scientific 
attitude, either in reference to one's own mind or to the 
mind of the outsider. One shades over into the other; 
one disburdens the other and makes it free for new and 
ever-new tasks. The practical psychologist, therefore, has 
no interest in replacing or eliminating the belief 
in the value of the so-called instinctive psychological 
reactions. 

But the most serious warning has not yet found words. 
The practical psychologist ought never to forget that his 
psychological understanding can give him insight only into 
the means needed for a certain end, hut cannot select the 
\ ends themselves. No educational psychology can deter- 
mine what pedagogical ends should be reached by the in- 
struction. The psychologist can only point out that if we 
want to reach these particular ends of education, just these 
particular means are needed. "We can understand the psy- 
chological mechanism of attention or memory or imitation 
and can deduce from this insight how memory or atten- 
tion or imitation are to be used. But psychology cannot 
tell us what is worth attending and what is the ideal to be 
imitated and what is the most desirable memory knowledge 
for life. Entirely different considerations of moral and 
social character have to determine the goal of instruction. 
This repeats itself in every other field. The psychologist 
may show to the lawyer by what means, for instance, a 
confession may be secured, but whether it is right or 
wrong, legally admissible or legally impossible to extract 
a confession from the defendant without his knowledge 
is a question with which the psychologist may not deal 
and to which the psychologist, as such, has nothing to con- 



THE AIM OF PEACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 351 

tribute. He knows how to reach the goal : he has no right 
to judge as to the value of the goal. 

This is not a shortcoming of present-day psychology 
which might be overcome by its progress, but it pertains 
to its deepest character, and it shares this necessary limita- 
tion with all the other causal sciences. The physicist, too, 
can only tell the civil engineer that if a building or a 
bridge or a railway is desirable at this place, he must use 
these technical means to realize the plan. But the physicist 
cannot possibly say from his standpoint of thought whether 
it is the right thing to build the railroad or the bridge or 
the building here and not elsewhere. Economic and social 
conditions have to determine that. We may say, in gen- 
eral, that it lies in the nature of causal sciences that they 
are unfit to direct us in the appreciation of our ends. Yet 
this is only the natural consequence of all that we recog- 
nized from the start, namely, that causal sciences represent 
only one special aspect of reality. W-e saw that our im- 
mediate life experience brings us into purposive relations 
wdiich as such cannot be considered causally, but must be 
interpreted. In this purposive system we find the ends 
and aims of our activities. We choose the special purpose 
Avith reference to our more general and, finally, to our 
ideal purposes. In the service of our purposes we seek 
the realization of our aims and ends. 

Life thus demands a continuous interweaving of the pur- 
posive and the causal treatment of experience. We cannot 
fulfill our purposes if we do not regard the causal aspect 
of the means by which ends can be attained. But, at the 
same time we cannot select any purposes if we know the 
inner and the outer world from the causal point of view 
only. Our practical desires in their purposive reality and 
ultimately our morality and religion in life philosophy 
must at every moment choose our aims, while the physical 
and causal psychological sciences must determine the 
means which serve them. 



CHAPTER XXYIII 

THE PSYCHOHISTORICAL SCIENCES 

Two Types of Application. — Our discussion of the pos- 
sible application of psychology has so far been entirely one- 
sided. If we speak of applying a science, it may be with 
two quite different meanings. We can apply the results of 
a theoretical science in order to be helped in our practical 
endeavors, but we can also apply it in order to solve other 
theoretical problems. In this latter sense we apply mathe- 
matics in studying the problems of physics, or we apply 
chemistry in studying the physiological functions of the 
organism, or we apply the results of philology in order to 
reconstruct ancient history. No doubt we can also in this 
sense apply psychology, both individual and social, in the 
service of many other theoretical sciences. Wherever we 
have the products of man's activity in his prehistoric or 
historic life, in language and religion, in state and legal 
institutions, in literature and art, in customs and folk 
lore, we can make use of psychology in the study of the 
given facts. 

Individual and social psychology give us the general laws 
of the mind. But besides them we can seek the application 
of these mental laws to the concrete historical facts. It 
is one thing to study the social-mental laws of panics or rev- 
olutions, and a very different thing to apply them to the 
explanation of a special historical crisis. In the midst of 
social psychology the historic facts — for instance, the devel- 
opment of a particular language or the growth of particu- 
lar customs or special wars — can serve only as illustrations 
of the laws. They may be drawn into the discussion as well 

352 



THE PSYCHOHISTOEICAL SCIENCES 353 

as the cases of individual heroes or individual criminals or 
artists may be used as illustrations for the laws of individ- 
ual psychology. But, on the whole, we can study individ- 
ual psychology just as well if we refer to the feelings, 
emotions, ideas and volitions of Tom, Dick and Harry, 
as if we refer to Washington and Lincoln. The social psy- 
chologist can in the same way discuss the phenomena of 
the social mind without referring to definite historic events. 
Hence the psychological analysis of real individual per- 
sons or of social movements does not find its place in theo- 
retical psychology. If we try to explain historic life with 
the help of psychology we have an entirely new science. It 
is truly an application of psychology. The field for it is 
unlimited. Whatever has appeared in the history of man- 
kind may be subjected to a psychological explanation either 
through individual or social psychology. We want to 
understand the origin of a definite work of art and seek 
the psychological motive of the artist. We want to under- 
stand a political deed and explain it by searching for the 
psychological causes in the mind of the statesman. We 
want to throw light on a crime and study the psychological 
conditions out of which it grew. But whether the phil- 
ologist applies psychology to explain the growth of the 
Indo- Aryan languages, whether the ethi!tDlogist reduces to 
psychology the migrations of large tribes or whether the 
historian explains psychologically the political alliances or 
the military actions or the tariff discussions or the indus- 
trial movements of the last century, in all cases this appli- 
cation of psychology is an effort of explanation which refers 
to given facts. 

It is evident that this stands in direct contrast to all 
those applications which we discussed before: the psycho- 
logical endeavors of the teacher, the lawyer, the physician, 
the manufacturer, the social reformer, the minister and so 
on. We have the same contrast in the natural sciences. 
We said that the physiologist employs chemistry for the 



354 PSYCHOLOGY 

explanation of the processes in the organism and that the 
physicist applies mathematics in the explanation of his 
physical events. How different when the technical chemist 
uses chemical knowledge in the interest of chemical indus- 
try in order to manufacture drugs or dyes, and when the 
engineer uses his mathematical knowledge in order to build 
bridges and tunnels. Physics and chemistry are applied 
here not to explain anything which is given, but to produce 
a certain effect, to attain a certain end which is desired. 
The first form was an application for theoretical purposes ; 
the second for practical. The two usages of the word 
''applied" must be clearly separated and any vague con- 
fusion avoided. All the technological sciences are applied 
sciences in the second sense of the word. The architect and 
the civil engineer, the electrician and the physician, all 
need particular theoretical sciences to fulfill certain pur- 
poses. Their end is not an explanation, but the erection 
of a building or the construction of a machine or the 
curing of a patient. 

In order to make the difference perfectly clear, we 
may use the term psychotechnics for that practical appli- 
cation which aims toward the realization of certain con- 
crete ends as against that other applied psychology which 
simply explains the given historical facts. Then the psy- 
chotechnical sciences stand in contrast to the psychohis- 
torical sciences. Psychotechnics is really a technical sci- 
ence related to causal psychology as engineering is related 
to physics. Psychotechnics necessarily refers to the future, 
while the psj^chohistorical sciences refer to the past. The 
psychotechnical endeavor may be turned in any direction 
in which important purposes of man are to be fulfilled. If 
we classify psychotechnics, we ought to divide it according 
to the groups of human purposes. We have a psychotech- 
nics of education and of medicine, of law and of politics, 
of commerce and of industry, and so on: wherever human 
tasks exist in the performance of which the mind of man 



THE PSYCHOHISTOEICAL SCIENCES 355 

plays a role, we have a legitimate part of psychotechnics. 

Yet we may say, the psychohistorical sciences which look 
backward and which explain the concrete happenings in 
mankind are no less controlled by our practical interests. 
Everything which the world offers demands understanding 
through theory, but when it comes to an application of 
knowledge, we have the right to select what seems prac- 
tically important and significant. From the inexhaustible 
mass of mental processes, we are interested only in those 
which are somehow linked with the development of our 
civilization. We have no interest in the explanation of 
mental happenings which had no influence on the great 
achievements of mankind. Just as the forward view of 
applied psychology in psychotechnics is confined to the 
regions of actual human purposes, the backward view is 
limited to those events which form the real history of 
civilization and its prehistoric preparation. The develop- 
ment of language and community life, of politics and law, 
of art and science and religion, is the central topic. 

The psychologist's interests in the prospective and retro- 
spective work are, however, not equally strong, not because 
the one field is more important than the other, but because 
the one, the psychotechnical field, belongs fully to psychol- 
ogy itself, while in the psychohistorical, explaiiatory study 
of civilization, the work must necessarily he taken up hy 
the historians. The psychologist has no right to lay par- 
ticular claim to it. It is the psychologist 's share to advise 
the educator or the lawyer or the man of affairs how to 
make use of psychology for his practical purposes, but it is 
hardly the psychologist's right to undertake the psycho- 
logical explanation of the political movements or of the 
development of languages or of religion or to make a psy- 
chological analysis of the great heroes and geniuses. As 
far as he studies the principles involved in the explana- 
tion, the results fall into the compass of individual and 
social psychology, but as far as these principles are applied 



356 . PSYCHOLOGY 

in order to explain the actual happenings, the historian 
alone is competent for the work. 

It is certainly no infringement on the rights of social 
psychology, if we insist that the psychological analysis of 
the historic or prehistoric material in its concrete geo- 
graphical and temporal setting is not a concern of the 
psychologist. For this reason it would be unbecoming 
to include here even the shortest review of the psycho- 
historical sciences as an organic part of the psychological 
system. It would be practically a review of human history 
from the time of savage life to the present day, a review 
of the development of language and customs and religions 
as well as of politics and economics, of law and education, 
of art and science. We cannot have one history written 
by historians and a second history written by psycholo- 
gists. The psychologist cannot do more than impress on 
the historian that his explanations of historic events are 
unscientific as long as they disregard the results of schol- 
arly individual and social psychology. The historian needs 
his psychology as the physicist needs his mathematics. 

Historical Individuals. — This making use of psychology 
for the explanation of the historical processes does not 
necessarily involve a conscious reference to formulated psy- 
chological laws. It would generally be clumsy and pedan- 
tic, if the historian, who explains the development of a 
statesman in a biography or who traces the causes of a 
war, really spoke the language of theoretical psychology. 
The historian can take the most important mental connec- 
tions for granted. They are furnished to everyone by 
the popular psychology of life, and however much scien- 
tific psychology may have to retouch such prescientific 
ideas, it is not probable that the leading convictions of 
popular psychology are entirely wrong. The knowledge 
that the suffering of injustice may lead to violent reac- 
tions, that in a state of excitement the members of a group 
are inclined to imitate one another, that love or ambition 



THE PSYCHOHISTOEICAL SCIENCES 357 

can inhibit habitual impulses, that youth is more enthusi- 
astic and less prudent than old age, or that race hatred can 
suppress sober reasoning, can be used by the historian 
without his consulting a psychological textbook. 

On principle every explanation based on such mat- 
ter of course statements is an application of psychology. 
The historian may the more often rely on the prescientific 
substitute, as it may be sufficient for his purposes to con- 
sider large units in the mind; the psychologist would 
resolve them into smaller parts and ultimately into psy- 
chological atoms, but these would have no bearing on the 
explanation of the historical event. Yet this justified re- 
liance on the products of popular psychology may at any 
moment lead to scientific error. Subtle connections may 
remain obscure, superficial relations may be accepted where 
a detailed psychological statement would show much deeper 
causes, references to the unexplainable springs of the per- 
sonality, entirely worthless from the causal standpoint, 
then become substitutes for the really needed explanation. 
Only a thorough understanding of scientific psychology 
in its individual and in its social aspect can make the 
historian recognize where his routine psychology can ren- 
der sufficient service and where the methods of theoretical 
psychology, and even of experimental and physiological 
and pathological psychology have to be introduced. 

This exact study refers as much to the individual per- 
sonalities as to the groups. The laboratory psychologist 
to-day uses so-called psychograms, that is standard blanks 
into which the answers to hundreds of detailed questions 
can be filled for a particular individual. He needs such 
psychograms for theoretical purposes in order to analyze 
the inherited and acquired mental dispositions and traits 
of an individuality. He needs them still more for prac- 
tical psychotechnical purposes, for instance, in order to 
foresee what mental development may be expected from a 
patient or a criminal or a pupil, and so on. But the 



358 PSYCHOLOGY 

ideal analysis of the historical personality would demand 
such a psychogram for an individual of the past too, if 
his thoughts, emotions and actions, as they enter into his- 
tory, are really to be explained. The historian's psycho- 
gram of his hero ought to show how far the mental traits of 
his ancestors and especially of his parents, the common 
mental features of his racial group, the influences of 
climate, his bodily traits and his health, his experience, his 
acquaintances, his reading, his education, his traveling, his 
economic circumstances probably shaped his mental struc- 
ture. The social atmosphere in which he lived, the tem- 
perament, the character, the intelligence, the rhythm of 
activity, the type of attention, of memory, of imagery, the 
mental habits and abilities ought to be analyzed as far as 
the available material allows. 

This psychological analysis is most fruitful in the case 
of historic personalities from the sphere of cultural life. 
The leaders in religion and art, in science and literature, 
demand such an explanation of their work and their in- 
fluence upon mankind still more than the heroes of war 
and the statesmen, whose achievements are more easily 
explained by means of the cruder conceptions of popular 
psychology. It is not impossible to connect the great 
differences of philosophical thinkers or of pioneer scien- 
tists or of great inventors with particular features of 
their imagery or their attention. The imagery of the 
philosophers or physicists who think the universe a world 
of substances and those who think it a system of energies 
is probably always different. Thinkers who visualize and 
thinkers who depend upon kinesthetic and motor images 
must arrive at different views of the world. Historians 
of science have divided the great leaders into romanticists 
and classicists; historians of philosophy have claimed that 
every thinker has in his nature an element of Platonism 
or of Aristotelianism. He has to be the one or the other, 
and whether the trend of his mind goes into the more ideal- 



THE PSYCHOHISTOEICAL SCIENCES 359 

istic or the more realistic direction depends upon elemen- 
tary differences in the psychical dispositions. The smallest 
divergences of attention or of associative tendency or of 
emotional trend may produce the strongest contrasts of life 
achievement, because these minimal influences which only 
the psychological analysis can discover cumulate through 
a lifetime. A slight inclination to prefer subordinated 
or superordinated associations may lead to the great dif- 
ferences of deductive and inductive scholarly production. 
A variation in the psychophysical power of inhibition may 
make the one a martj^r and the other a traitor. 

Historical Social Events. — The explanation of the 
group processes is usually based on popular psychology 
too. But it is evident that the opportunities for exact 
psychograms of the social mind are no less abundant here. 
The historian must know the mental traits of a people, 
or a race, or of a local community in order to explain 
the political or social or religious or cultural reactions. 
The statistical data, the objective products of the past, 
direct observation of typical members of the group, must 
be used to draw the detailed mental picture. The geograph- 
ical influences, the technical conditions, the economic back- 
ground, the legal forms of community life, must be esti- 
mated as causes of psychological dispositions. The tem- 
perament, talent, character, and intelligence of the social 
group, its suggestibility and excitability, its originality 
and its energy, must be examined like the mental features 
of a single individual. But at the same time the gen- 
eral results of social psychology must be applied : the laws 
of the formation of classes, of the growth of social con- 
trasts, of fashions and customs, of social decay and cor- 
ruption, of the influence of religion, of prosperity, of pre- 
vailing individualism or communism, of belief in liberty 
and of belief in loyalty, or of the influence of women, 
and so on. The knowledge of the particular social mind 
and of the general psychosociological laws is equally nee- 



360 PSYCHOLOGY 

essary for a true explanation of a historic group process. 
The explanation of individuals and of masses must be 
constantly combined. The historian of religion must un- 
derstand individual psychology to explain the develop- 
ment in Buddha, and social psychology to explain the 
spreading of Buddhism in Asia. 

The historian needs psychological explanation not only 
for the life process, but also for the objective products of 
social work. The history of technic from the prehistoric 
tools of the savages to the most complicated machines of 
our factories is the history of objects which must be ex- 
plained by reference to psychological conditions. A pop- 
ular haphazard psychology cannot possibly fulfill this de- 
mand. The exact physiological psychology of the motor 
impulses must be understood. The saving of energy which 
the rhythmical movement makes possible, the advantage 
of intentional impulses which can be easily combined and 
the disadvantage of impulses which interfere with each 
other, the effects of motor impulses to the large muscles 
on the efficiency of the small ones, the possibility of or- 
ganizing will impulses into group units and of making 
them automatic and many similar psychophysiological con- 
ditions must be considered, if the historian is to explain 
the development of technic. Or we may point to the 
miracles of the church. They cannot be grouped in the 
system of causes and effects, if the historian knows no more 
about autosuggestion and heterosuggestion, about inliibi- 
tion and emotion, about imagination and individual en- 
deavors, than popular psychology furnishes. 

Even this explanation of the social products must often 
be linked with the most detailed experimental work. The 
observations and classifications which are reported in the 
history of science cannot really be explained, unless the 
exact details of the sensation and perception and repro- 
duction are carefully recorded. In astronomy, for in- 
stance, the stars were always grouped into classes which 



THE PSYCHOHISTOEICAL SCIENCES 361 

were based on very unequal arithmetical differences of 
light intensity, but the psychophysical investigations of 
the laboratory have demonstrated the cause. The differ- 
ence between two pairs of stars appears equal, if the lights 
are in the same relation. The history of languages shows 
how they changed through the psychological tendencies 
of the speakers and through contact with other languages 
in the minds of the masses. Involuntary formations of 
analogies, facilitations of the motor impulses, habitual 
associations, inhibitions of speech impulses and similar 
processes lead to the transformations. The student of the 
history of language is accustomed to collect such material 
and to deduce from the successive forms the principle of 
change which must explain the single facts. But the 
linguists have only begun to recognize what a great gain 
can come to them if they make use of psychological lab- 
oratory experiments which are devoted to these processes 
of association and inhibition. Experiments on the mutual 
interference of word ideas in their influence on the speech 
reaction can quickly illuminate the slow transition proc- 
esses from one stage of the language to the next. 

Or we may turn to the field of art. The historic account 
of architecture, sculpture and painting cannot explain the 
development, if it ignores the exact details of the effects 
which the artistic works produced. This involves not only 
the general problems of association and emotion, but even 
the subtlest processes of optical illusion, of color con- 
trast, of form, of equilibrium in symmetry, of repetition. 
Everyone of such mental effects can be understood only 
if it is made independent from vague general impressions 
and is submitted to exact experimentation in the psycho- 
logical workshop. Experiments have shown why the verse 
must be limited to a certain number of feet, and the 
stanza to a certain number of lines, why the rhyme must 
be at a particular place, why some feet in the verse can 
be replaced by others and some cannot be changed, why 



362 PSYCHOLOGY 

the caesura must be in a certain place. The explanation 
of the work the great artists have created thus finds its 
ultimate explanation in the painstaking psychophysical 
experiment. 

To draw an illustration from the history of music, we 
may think of the surprising changes in the appreciation 
of different tone combinations. The old Greeks considered 
the octave alone as the true consonance, which gave a 
complete feeling of rest, while the fifth and the fourth were 
not really restful, and the third Avas altogether dissonant. 
Four centuries after Christ the fifth and fourth were in 
the same class of consonance with the octave : it is the 
third which is now in the intermediate class, and every 
other interval a dissonance. In the eleventh century the 
major third gained a place among the full consonances, 
while the minor third was still forbidden; in the twelfth 
century the minor third was welcomed. In modern times 
the musical world has added the seventh to its consonances. 
Such developments are not explained, if they are simply 
historically stated. Their explanation demands an insight 
into psychological processes which only the experiment can 
analyze. The experiment can demonstrate that a per- 
sistent hearing of tone combinations really produces a 
change in the mental disposition, by which the feeling of 
consonance is shifted. Only through such psychological 
analysis can we comprehend why every great composer — ■ 
Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, Debussy — 
was denounced in his own time and was welcome to the 
ears of the next generation. The dissonances which are 
often heard become actual consonances. 

But whether we point to the cases in which the his- 
torian has to consult the records of laboratory experiments 
or to the more frequent cases where the fundamental 
conceptions and laws of individual and social psychology 
are adequate for the explanation of the historical processes, 
it is always the historian's work to seek for an explana- 



THE PSYCHOHISTOEICAL SCIENCES 363 

tion of his material. The psychologist must set forth 
the necessity of applying psj^chology — and for this reason 
Tve had to outline the situation here — but the application 
itself is a part of the historical sciences. 

History and Purposive Psychology.— AYe have ignored 
so far one other reason why it sometimes appears as if 
the psychological explanation of the world's history be- 
longed to the psychologist and not to the historian. Many 
historians, and surely not the worst among them, are 
convinced that their highest task is not the explanation, 
hut the understanding of the past of mankind. Their his- 
toric work deals with the interpretation of the great lead- 
ers and of the nations. The meaning of a significant 
life and of a great movement but not the causes interest 
them. Such a historian is convinced that the purposive 
view of history alone fulfills his mission. The causal 
analysis of the past appears to him, therefore, as extra- 
neous, and he has the natural tendency to relegate it to 
the quarters of the psychologist. 

But this idea evidently takes a new character in the 
light of our discussions on causal and purposive aspects 
of the mind. We have recognized that a full account of 
the mental life always requires both points of view. Causal 
and purposive psychology appeared to us coordinated. To 
interpret the inner life of the statesman or thinker or 
poet or religious leader and to show the meaning in the 
thoughts and emotions of the masses, must therefore be 
recognized as psychological treatment too. It is an appli- 
cation of purposive psychology, just as the other study 
was an application of causal psychology. The one cannot 
be separated from the other and if the one belongs to 
the historian, the other belongs to his sphere too. The 
psychohistoric interest must have the same double face 
which our daily life experience has shown to us. The life- 
work of Napoleon may be psychologically explained, but 
it must, above all, be psychologically interpreted. We 



364 PSYCHOLOGY 

may ask for the causes of his decisions on the battle- 
fields, but the true pulse of history is felt still more when 
we study the meaning of his decisions. We may describe 
and explain the mass movements of the French Revolution, 
but we have not understood it until we interpret the 
meaning in the minds of those clashing groups with the 
help of purposive psychology. 



PAET II. THE PSYCHOTECHNICAL 
SCIENCES 

CHAPTER XXIX 
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 

The Educational Purposes. — The material of the psycho- 
technical sciences might be classified and presented from 
the point of view of theoretical psychology. Then we 
should pass from one mental function to another, and with 
each one raise the question in what fields of practical 
life it might be applied. The function of memory, for 
instance, ought to be understood by the teacher who de- 
mands memory work from the pupils, by the lawyer who 
depends upon the memory of his witnesses, by the merchant 
who relies on the memory effect of his advertisement, by 
the physician who examines the memory defects of a 
mentally abnormal patient, and by many others who are 
engaged in practical pursuits. Processes like attention or 
suggestion or imitation or volition are significant in almost 
every practical endeavor, and indeed it would not be im- 
possible to group the psychotechnical data under such 
psychological headings. Yet the true meaning of the 
psychotechnical sciences would be suppressed by such a 
method. Everything would appear a mere appendix to 
theoretical psychology, without any independent rights of 
its own. The special applications would be degraded to 
mere chance illustrations. They would not be held together 
by a common principle. The material would be scat- 

365 



366 PSYCHOLOGY 

tered, and we should never be sure whether or not impor- 
tant fields of practical psychology were overlooked. 

We can expect unity in the study of applications only 
if v/e subordinate everything to the idea of purpose. Every 
application is controlled by the wish to fulfill some prac- 
tical purpose. It must do some good in the human world, 
and the ideas of these various purposes must give unity 
to the whole. Hence we shall organize the facts nowhere 
with reference to the mental functions applied, but always 
with reference to the aims to be fulfilled. We shall not 
separate memory, attention and so on, but law, medicine, 
education, commerce, industry, art, science, social reform, 
and to each of these parts the greatest variety of mental 
functions will be made contributory. Moreover we must 
try to present consistently not only these general divisions, 
but the subdivisions as well, with reference to the pur- 
poses of life. We must not only bring everything together 
which serves legal interests, but we must distinguish again 
the various aims of the lawyer; we must separate the 
weighing of evidence from the securing of confessions. 
When we speak of the aims of the physician, we must 
separate the purpose of diagnosis from the purpose of 
prognosis, the treatment of mental abnormities from the 
treatment of nervous diseases. 

The order in which the chief groups are to be discussed 
is necessarily to a certain degree arbitrary. If we give 
precedence to the study of educational purposes, it might 
well be claimed that this first place belongs to them for 
historical reasons. For a long while this chapter monopo- 
lized the name of applied psychology, and certainly in 
recent years the greatest amount of specialistic work has 
been done in this field. It is not surprising that this is 
the case. The boys and the girls of the classroom offer 
material for study which is always at the disposal of the 
observer. Whoever wants to make experiments on wit- 
nesses or workingmen or artists or patients has to fight 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 367 

with numberless practical difficulties, but the school-chil- 
dren are always ready and glad when the instruction is 
interrupted by experiments in the service of science. 
Above all, the school-teachers themselves stand so much 
nearer to psychology than the judges or physicians or 
manufacturers. They have been in touch with psychology 
throughout their vocational life, and they feel the need of 
an understanding of mental conditions more immediately. 
The interest of parents and friends of children has con- 
tributed not a little to the gathering of material. When 
we spoke of the limitations of applied psychology, we 
could not avoid mentioning some pedagogical dangers of 
this movement and adding a word of warning. Moreover 
it is evident that the ease with which parents and teachers 
may carry on psychological experiments with children can 
lead to a certain superficiality, for a true experiment 
requires a most careful study of all the conditions in- 
volved. Yet it must be acknowledged that pedagogical 
psychology has really been developed in the last decade 
into a well-consolidated psychotechnical science with an 
abundance of suggestive material and significant advice. 
Here we can trace only its outlines. 

In this field especially it is customary to distribute 
the facts in purely psychological groups, like memory, 
apperception, habit, attention, and will. But we must 
ignore here also every demarcation line which is not de- 
manded by the difference of purposes. This opens, to be 
sure, the question of what the real purpose of education 
ought to be, a question far too large to be answered here 
by the way. There is no unity of opinion among the 
schoolmen, and even the same institutions may be inter- 
preted in a different spirit. In the eyes of one iparty edu- 
cation ought to prepare everyone for a definite vocation. 
Every feature of school life ought to serve immediately 
useful ends. The other party claims that the aim of edu- 
cation is to make the youth willing and able to serve 



368 PSYCHOLOGY 

the realization of human ideals. The practical technic 
of the vocations then becomes secondary: the cultural 
value of education, the training of the personality, the 
development of that which is to be common to all, be- 
come the primary end. But we cannot overlook the fact 
that the psychologist's help does not refer to these ulti- 
mate ends, but rather to the more immediate purposes 
which are common to all educational systems. We can 
isolate these definite educational purposes without set- 
tling which aims they are finally to serve. 

There are, first of all, three pedagogical ends which 
exist for every educator, whether his purposes are voca- 
tional or cultural, or whatever they may be. He must 
supply information, must train the pupils in certain abil- 
ities and must awake in them certain interests. "What- 
ever the final life activity of the pupil and student is to 
be, there is none in which these three psychological ele- 
ments do not have to cooperate. Whoever is to fill a 
place in society must have acquired for it some knowledge, 
some ability and some motive power; and it is never pos- 
sible to substitute any one of these three for the others. 
Education is from every point of view a preparation for 
lifework. To provide the youth with these three funda- 
mental dispositions is the immediate purpose of all edu- 
cation. The knowledge may be that of the alphabet or 
that of the latest scientific discovery, the ability may lead 
from the first efforts of writing to the highest efforts of 
technical skill, and the interests may move from the sim- 
plest curiosity to the highest moral idealism. Every edu- 
cational influence must proceed in one of these three lines. 
The first three educational questions of applied psychology, 
therefore, ought to be : how can psychology help toward 
the selection of the best means by which the teacher may 
supply information, train in abilities and awake interests ? 
But this leads to a further inquiry of most practical con- 
sequence: how must the educator readjust these three en- 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 369 

deavors and combine them into a well-organized plan of 
instruction adapted to the mental life of the pupil? This 
organization of instruction is a new special purpose, and 
accordingly an independent problem of applied psy- 
chology. 

The Imparting of Knowledge. — The knowledge which 
the pupil is to acquire must somehow enter through the 
senses and must therefore be material of perception. A 
clear, distinct, correct and vivid sense impression is, ac- 
cordingly, the first condition for the gathering of informa- 
tion, and any insight into the conditions of sense percep- 
tion may help toward the improvement of the teacher's 
work. The unimpeded functioning of the sense organs 
is the first factor which is too often neglected. Short- 
sightedness, astigmatism, deficient hearing are too frequent 
conditions for mental backwardness. But a similar inef- 
ficiency of the sensory impressions must result when the 
stimulus lacks intensity or sharpness of outline. The 
vagueness and indistinctness of the sensory starting point 
in the mind hinders the whole mental response, retards 
associations and leaves insufficient traces for the memory. 

The child 's possibilities of perception are not fully devel- 
oped. The discrimination of differences of very light colors 
or still more of very dark colors like brown and blue offers 
difficulties for a long while. The perception of time in- 
tervals is most inaccurate, and while in a child of seven 
years the perception of distances shows nearly the correct- 
ness of that of an adult, the perception of forms is still 
insufficient for subtle tasks. The perception of rhythm is 
still little developed. The teacher should constantly con- 
sider these shortcomings of the young mind. He has no 
right to presuppose that the picture which he shows awakes 
the same impression in the child as in the adult. More- 
over we have steadily emphasized the intimate relation 
between perception and motor reaction. The kinesthetic 
sensations from the reactive movements enter into the 



370 PSYCHOLOGY 

perceptions themselves, and tlie central motor innervation 
is responsible for the vividness of the perceptive impres- 
sion. We must therefore add the further pedagogical 
demand that the teacher give attention from the start to 
the development of motor reactions in response to the ob- 
jects to be perceived. The child must follow with the 
eyes, fixate and accommodate, must draw what he sees, 
speak or write what he hears, in the service of the perfect 
perception itself. 

This leads us to the importance of attention for the 
acquisition of knowledge. In its crudest form, of course, 
we direct the attention of the child by pointing to this 
or that detail, by underlining and accenting, by demand- 
ing a bodily position in which interfering stimuli are ex- 
cluded and the sense organs adjusted to the perceptions, 
by demanding speech reactions: in short, by focusing all 
bodily responses on the important object. Everything 
which is loud and shining, which is moving and changing, 
or on the other hand, which is familiar or which awakes 
curiosity and emotion, controls such focusing reactions 
most easily. Where such reenforcements from without 
are lacking, the attention must be guided by associations 
which may either rise from the impressions themselves or 
which may be prepared in the pupil's mind beforehand 
by the teacher. Or finally the mere idea of attention and 
the effort to attend may keep the channels of discharge 
open and thus produce a vivid experience through a volun- 
tary attention without associational help. 

The psychological tact of the teacher will suggest how 
to find a middle way and how to avoid the extremes. It 
is clear that a sensory attention which depends entirely 
on the external impressiveness and which appeals to the 
mere instincts is ultimately inefficient. It leaves the power 
of voluntary attention untrained and soon reaches the end 
of its possibilities. Constant alternation is necessary. The 
teacher may make the perceptions impressive by his loud 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 371 

voice for a little while, but if he were to shout all the time, 
an adjustment would set in by which the stimulus would 
become ineffective. Every appeal to curiosity, every mere 
amusement, or any external impressiveness, is therefore 
effective only w^hen it is rarely used. On the other hand, 
the continuous appeal to the voluntary attention must 
overtax the psychophysical resources. Fatigue sets in, and 
the fatigue sensation in itself is a stimulus for antagonistic 
reaction ; the mind wanders, what was inhibited becomes 
vivid, what was attended fades away. The most satis- 
factory result can be expected when the attention is di- 
rected neither by the appealing qualities of the stimulus 
from without nor by the mere good will to attend, but by 
the ideas which the pupil's own mind supplies in connec- 
tion with the attended objects of perception. 

The psychological experiment demonstrates the great 
individual differences in the character of attention to outer 
impressions ; and the teacher cannot afford to ignore these 
variations. If an object is shown which contains many 
colors and many forms, there will be some children in the 
class who are able to concentrate their attention on the 
colors so fully, when they are asked to do so, that they 
will later be unable to give any account of the forms, and 
vice versa. Others may concentrate their attention on the 
colors, and yet at the same time may be sufficiently im- 
pressed by the forms to keep them in mind. We have 
hardly the right to claim that the strong concentration 
power of attention is the only desirable condition for 
educational progress. The mind which does not entirely 
inhibit the not attended, has other advantages for the 
selfdevelopment. We simply stand before two different 
types which must be respected as such. But experimental 
results show no less the individual differences in the rapid- 
ity with which the attention adjusts itself to changing 
impressions, or in the breadth of attention. One is able 
to hold together in his field of attention a complex of many 



/ 



372 PSYCHOLOGY 

interrelated objects, while another can give his full atten- 
tion only to a narrow field. But beside these individual 
variations, the teacher must take still more account of the 
undeveloped state of the child's attention. The disturb- 
ances find less resistance in the young mind, the chance 
impressions make the attention shift and fluctuate, fatigue 
overcomes the child's attention more quickly. 

"We have characterized the attentive perception as clear, 
definite and vivid, but we must add another aspect: the 
perceived object becomes apperceived. We saw that the 
psychologist means by this that the sense impression, 
whether a thing or a word, is understood in its relation 
and is thus brought into its right setting in the pupil's 
mind. No impression remains entirely isolated in any 
consciousness. A perception without some slight apper- 
ceptive response, may be called a scientific fiction. But 
everything depends upon the degree of apperception. The 
attention is the most favorable condition for the richest 
apperception of which the mind is capable. As soon as 
the attention becomes fatigued, the apperception crumbles.. 
If we give our attention to a printed word like ' ' elephant, ' ' 
we apperceive it at once in its full meaning. But if we 
fixate it for several minutes with an effort to keep our 
attention only on this one word, it soon loses its apper- 
ceptive unity. The meaning seems to fade away: naked 
letters stare at us. 

To keep apperception alive, attention must be held by 
external or internal means. On the other hand, there can 
be no doubt that the material which is to serve as true 
information must indeed be apperceived and apperceived 
in its objective connections. What is meaningless to the 
child is educationally useless. Everything must be under- 
stood in its relation to the ideas which the pupil has gath- 
ered and this is valid for the scientific work of the pro- 
fessional student as well as for the first study of pictures 
in the elementary grade. Whatever psychology can teach 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 373 

of the laws of apperception may become valuable for the 
guidance of the teacher. The careful preparation of the 
material in an order in which it allows apperception and 
yet demands the pupil's effort to secure the appercep- 
tive grasp must be one of the chief cares of the thoughtful 
teacher. 

Psychological experiments have often been carried on 
with reference to the various stages of apperception 
through which the child's mind passes, and also as to the 
various types. If a picture of a complex scene is shown 
to a child less than eight years old, he is inclined to 
apperceive the single objects, his attention often being 
held by a most trivial part. Then follows the stage in 
which the things, and especially the persons, in the pic- 
ture are apperceived in their functions and activities. At 
about the tenth year, the local, temperamental and causal 
connections begin to interest the young mind, and finally 
a stage is reached in which a real intelligent analysis of 
the whole scene suggests itself. The rhythm of this de- 
velopment varies with different individuals, but the types 
of apperception vary still more. It has become usual to 
discriminate a descriptive, a connecting, a scholarly, and an 
emotional type. The one apperceives the isolated elements, 
the second apperceives the group in its connectedness, the 
third is controlled more by the associated knowledge than 
by the impressions themselves, and the last by the relation 
to feelings. All four types can be found in any group 
of pupils as well as in any group of adults; and yet the 
particular apperceptive type of the child is on the whole 
more influenced by the tendencies of the fourth type. The 
child is more ready to give a subjective interpretation to 
the apperceived surroundings. His own feelings are pro- 
jected into the things. 

If the aim of the instruction is the understanding of 
the world, and this understanding is based on the apper- 
ception, and this apperception is dependent upon the con- 



374 PSYCHOLOGY 

nections of the perceived material with the ideas in the 
pupil's mind, everything finally depends upon the ac- 
quirement of fit associations. No mind can furnish any 
new elements by mere imagination. The associations which 
arise in the service of apperceptions must be reproduc- 
tions of earlier impressions. If these reproductions arise 
in consciousness in the order in which the primary impres- 
sions were received, we speak of memory, but if their order 
is controlled by the demands of feelings, we call it imagi- 
nation. Psychology can in no way furnish more imme- 
diate assistance to the work of the school than by deter- 
mining the laws of memory. It is therefore not surprising 
that in recent years the largest part of educational psychol- 
ogy has been devoted to the experimental study of the 
economy of learning. 

The psychological experiment demonstrates how the 
exactitude decreases with the passing of time, at first rap- 
idly and then slowly, how rhythmical learning aids in the 
reproduction, how learning in large quantities is more 
economic than learning in little, detached parts, and how 
a number of repetitions at one time are far less effective 
than the same number divided into several groups of repe- 
titions. Mere repeated reading of a series is less efficient 
than a combination of readings and free memory render- 
ings; reproducing the series by one's own effort leaves a 
stronger disposition in memory. The greater the demand 
which the series to be learned makes on the memory, the 
greater becomes the efficiency of the reproductive mechan- 
ism. Reading aloud is more favorable to rapidity of learn- 
ing than silent reading. And we might add a hundred 
similar observations. Nor has the teacher a right to over- 
look the differences of visual, acoustical and motor types of 
memory. If an auditory series is presented to a strong 
visualizer, he feels obliged to visualize the word as soon 
as he hears it, and thus takes additional time, which greatly 
lessens the rapidity of learning. The pupils of the acous- 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 375 

tical type have difficulty in learning that which they only 
see. Those who are predominantly of the motor type 
naturally profit most from the opportunity of speaking 
aloud or writing that which they are to impress on their 
memory. The children of the motor type are more in- 
clined to take hold of words, as these more easily offer 
motor cues. Since the intellectual development of the 
individual takes its normal course from the ideas of con- 
crete objects to words, the motor type seems to be pre- 
disposed to rapid intellectual progress. 

The child, we saw, has a very weak power of immediate 
recall, but as soon as he has really taken hold of the 
memory material, he retains it relatively well. The growth 
of the memory is not continuous. It grows most rapidly 
at about the tenth year, while it proceeds slowly at about 
the fourteenth. A point of great importance, too little 
valued as yet, is the fact that the psychophysical process 
of learning continues after the end of the presentation and 
demands a period of undisturbed internal organization 
in order to make that which was learned available. A 
disturbance or any strong intellectual engagement after 
the learning may destroy the retention entirely. If 
the child is obliged to make strong mental efforts imme- 
diately after the process of absorbing new memory 
material, the learning must be to a high degree frus- 
trated. 

The Development of Abilities. — Mere knowledge, that 
is, mere information without ability to make use of it, 
cannot be the goal of education. But the developing of 
the abilities does not refer onl}^ to external acts like 
reading and writing, but just as much to intellectual activ- 
ities like attending, thinking, calculating. We can most 
easily analyze the factors contained in such voluntary 
actions in the case of the external motor functions. We 
can study how the child learns to walk and to speak, or 
how the grown-up person learns the technic of a musical 



376 PSYCHOLOGY 

instrument or the writing on a typewriter. Yet we can- 
not emphasize too much the similarity between the exter- 
nal and the internal actions, between the movements of the 
limbs and the movements of the thoughts. To remember, to 
invent, to attend, to observe, to reason, means above all to 
adjust inner impulses to the final aim, to suppress and in- 
hibit those which interfere and to excite and to reenforce 
those which lead forward. The training in external actions 
is practically the model process for the training in all psy- 
chical abilities. If we are to gather from the training in 
motor abilities the principles for the training in abilities 
in general, we ought to put emphasis on the following 
psychological factors. First we must make use of the 
involuntary reflexes; secondly, we must make use of the 
instinct to imitation ; thirdly, we must resolve the complex 
action to be learned into its elements; fourthly, we must 
reenforce the activity by suggestion; and, lastly, we must 
mechanize the process by repetition. 

The involuntary motor impulses and reflexes are indeed 
the given material without which no development of volun- 
tary powers can be understood. There are numberless 
short cuts and substitutions, but somehow all learning 
of an intentional activity starts from the experience of 
involuntary reactions which come up from the inborn psy- 
chophysical dispositions. In a corresponding way we have 
to accept the tendency to imitation as the inborn disposi- 
tion which is not learned but which precedes learning. No 
child would learn to speak who had not the instinctive 
impulse first to produce sounds and secondly to imitate 
sounds. This imitation is at first imperfect, but it is just 
the incompleteness of the success which drives the child 
forward. The most essential further step is the resolution 
of the action into simpler motor functions, which slowly 
become combined. Whether the child learns reading or 
writing, dancing or swimming, carpentry or piano play- 
ing, the whole set of simultaneous and successive move- 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 377 

ments must be built up by imitating the single ac- 
tions which in themselves are useless for the final pur- 
poses. 

A skillful training demands no less the suppression of 
opposing impulses, and this is the place where suggestion 
has its chief task. Finally there is no learning of motor 
ability without repetition: every new performance de- 
creases the resistance in the motor path until the response 
to the stimulus becomes automatic. The formation of such 
habits is the significant end. The trained piano player 
does not exert his will for the special finger movements. 
As soon as the idea of playing controls his motor setting, 
the black dots on the paper produce the immediate impulse 
to the right finger actions. It is evident that the coopera- 
tion of these five psychophysical factors demands the most 
perfect adjustment, if the result is to be reached in the 
shortest time, with the smallest effort and with the most 
finished effect. The desirable alternation between periods 
of training and periods of rest, the rhythm and rapidity 
of repetition of one group of movements before a new set 
is learned, the most economic analysis of the complex, the 
various habits of manipulation and of control, the associa- 
tions formed between the sensory impressions and the 
actions and many other factors must determine the ad- 
vance. 

The teacher must take care that the particular types of 
difficulties which the pupil finds during this learning 
process are promptly overcome as they appear. He must 
be helpful to the child in the acquisition of right methods, 
discouraging of all unnatural and circuitous ones which 
involve loss of time and energy. He ought to minimize 
the formation of disturbing habits, he must make sure that 
the learner does not push himself forward too fast at the 
critical stages, and he must show that way in which the 
elemental habits, as soon as they are perfect, may be or- 
ganized into habits of higher order. This is true of read- 



378 PSYCHOLOGY 

ing and writing as well as of the most complex actions 
which the future engineer or physician has to learn for 
his profession. But the chief function of the teacher is 
the prevention of movements which interrupt the forma- 
tion of habits. Exceptions are always dangerous. It is 
even important to avoid repetitions in a stage of fatigue, 
in which the gain of learning is easily destroyed by the 
unsuccessful performances. 

Exactly the same rules which bind the learning of motor 
habits are valid for the acquirement of inte^mal abilities, 
for instance, habits of attention. The attention to complex 
combinations has to be built up from elemental habits of 
attending to simple stimuli. Here again the teacher has 
to make use of the involuntary acts of attention which 
precede the voluntary effort. Suggestion reenforces the 
formation and the training through repetition transforms 
attention itself into a habit. Everything depends again on 
skillful guidance and upon the rigidness of the discipline. 
Whoever has not learned early to concentrate his attention 
can acquire it later only with unusual difficulty. A psy- 
chomotor apparatus which is shiftless and which is carried 
away by every incoming disturbance and attraction cannot 
suddenly be used to serve serious ends. The habit of con- 
centrating the attention has to be learned as much as 
playing the piano. The attention given to an end which 
is to be realized by work constitutes the habit of effort. 
The child must learn how to acquire this ability for sys- 
tematic work. 

Finally we have the same processes when pure thought 
is involved. The ability to proceed from the premises to 
the conclusions depends too upon involuntary movements 
of ideas which furnish the material and upon imitation 
which secures the technic of the logical process. The 
interfering fallacies must be inhibited, the complex thought 
processes must be built up from the elementary ones, and 
systematic repetition must develop the habit of grasping 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 379 

the right conclusion. The ability to reach such a logical 
end must be learned like the ability to catch a ball. 

The abilities for reading and writing which have been 
most studied in the psychological laboratory are education- 
ally especially interesting. The old-fashioned method of 
learning to read by beginning with the alphabet evidently 
contradicted the psychological laws of development of 
complex abilities. The child had to name the single letters 
and the action of reading the word could therefore never 
be produced by connecting the elementary reactions. As 
the child knows how to speak before he learns to read, the 
unity of the speech impulse for the word exists before 
the reading lesson. The association between the whole pic- 
ture of the word and the language seems to be the natural 
starting point. Yet correct reading demands that every 
single letter influence the reaction. A¥e ought therefore 
to connect a special motor expression with every single 
sign. The synthesizing of these elementary processes into 
complexes is practically unlimited in the field of read- 
ing, as the words must be combined in sentences. The 
experiment shows that the trained reader never moves his 
eyes steadily from one end of the line to the other, but that 
the eyes make jerking movements, jumping four or five 
times in a line from one resting place to another. If never- 
theless the mental process of reading remains unbroken, we 
must presuppose an extremely complicated organization 
of automatic functions. Al whole complex of words must 
be grasped by one psychophysical act. A short sentence 
is indeed recognized as an optical unit. 

Subtle experiments with reference to the pressure of 
the writing pen have shown that the writing impulses for 
whole words and even for phrases also become organized 
into such units, reactions in which the motor impulse for 
each single letter is a subordinated component of auto- 
matic character. The child must begin with the imitation 
of the single lines and curves, and must be trained in habit- 



380 PSYCHOLOGY 

•aally binding them together, until finally the mere idea 
of the meaning of the word is sufficient to give one impulse 
for the totality of these subordinated automatic acts. The 
same processes characterize the pupil's progress in draw- 
ing and playing musical instruments, in manual training 
work and domestic work like sewing, and on a higher level 
in the acquirement of professional technic. But the edu- 
cation in good manners and tact, in habits of cleanliness 
and hygiene, and in a certain sense in moral behavior, 
demands these same psychological processes of upbuilding 
the complex from the simple and of forming habits through 
repetitions without exception. 

The Arousing of Feelings. — We have insisted that in- 
formation and ability can never be sufficient for a life- 
work. Every vocation and every avocation demands a 
third component: a motive power which leads to the ap- 
plication of knowledge and ability. Knowledge and ability 
are dispositions and interests must make them active. The 
personal desires like those for the satisfaction of hunger 
and thirst, for comfort and for absence of pain, do not 
need any training. They are given as inborn instincts. 
Around them clusters the large group of selfish desires 
which gain their special form from the social conditions: 
the demand for luxury and power, for social honor and 
protection against needs, for personal adornment and the 
accumulation of wealth. But the mechanism of our social 
world for which the school educates the youth must de- 
mand very different groups of interests, if society is to 
fulfill its purpose. The individual must learn to take part 
in the interests of his fellowmen and in the ideal inter- 
ests of truth, beauty and morality. In the vocational life 
of most men and women several of these groups of motives 
are intertwined. Selfish interests and social interests and 
ideal interests generally work together so that the indi- 
vidual can hardly tell where one ends and another begins. 

These interests must be developed by education. Just 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 381 

as no abilities can be developed without the given dispo- 
sition to motor reactions, no feeling attitudes can be 
formed without simple organic experiences of pleasure and 
displeasure as starting points. Moreover the tendencies 
toward strength and weakness, toward quickness and slow- 
ness, toward persistency and instability, in the feeling 
reactions also evidently belong to the inborn dispositions: 
external training does not fundamentally change the tem- 
perament. Yet the educational influence on the emotional 
life of the child and on the development of his satisfac- 
tions, and accordingly on his motives may be no less thor- 
ough than on his knowledge and his abilities. Any insight 
into the mechanism of suggestion, inhibition and imita- 
tion can be made profitable for the moulding of feelings. 

The demands of the infant are entirely egotistic. To 
create altruism and idealism does not mean to create new 
emotional elements, but to connect the feeling values with 
different groups of experiences and to detach pleasure 
and displeasure from the mere gratification of the instinc- 
tive personal desires. This is the place where the human- 
istic instruction has to build the psychological bridges. 
The instruction in history and literature should especially 
emphasize this personal element and enlarge by suggestion 
the possibility of useful emotional response. From a psy- 
chological point of view nothing is lost from the value of 
ideal interests when we recognize that even the highest 
moral feelings may be learned by the individual through 
associations of strictly personal pleasure and displeasure 
with certain ideas of behavior. 

Our rewards and punishments may reenforce these feel- 
ing values and attach them to ideas which were at first 
indifferent. Instinctive imitation and the power of sug- 
gestion are essential for this upbuilding process of higher 
feelings. It cannot be denied that both are easily disturbed 
by the suspicion of artificiality which may result in the 
pupil's mind when he notices a scientific, calculating atti- 



382 PSYCHOLOGY 

tilde on the part of the teacher. The teacher who is car- 
ried away hy his enthusiasm and by his belief in trnth 
and beauty and morality may therefore actually arouse in 
the pupil'fe mind a deeper longing for ideal values than 
another who proceeds in a more psychological spirit. But 
however much the teacher may rely on the inspiring in- 
fluence of his enthusiasm this too is of course an influence 
which can be decomposed into elements of stimulation, 
imitation, association and inhibition. . 

Finally even the simple feelings have their characteristic 
organic expression, especially their relations to muscle 
contractions. On the one side we know that the sensory 
effects of these activities themselves enter as parts into 
the emotional experience. The exciting or suppressing of 
the movement thus involves an accentuation or an inhibi- 
tion of the actual feelings. On the other side the cen- 
tral innervation of those motor processes is itself a condi- 
tion for the feeling. The control over the movements of 
expression can thus ultimately become a control over the 
emotions themselves. Going through the movements of 
caresses favors a feeling of tenderness and carrying out 
fighting movements reenforces the emotion of anger. This 
interconnection between action and feeling with its impor- 
tance for emotional education is certainly not confined to 
these clumsy actions in which arms and legs are involved. 
It has the same importance for the finest motor innerva- 
tions, for the intonation of the voice and the choice of 
words and even more internally for the choice of thoughts 
and ideas. 

The Work of the Pupils. — We have recognized that all 
education has three different purposes, the furnishing of 
information, the training in abilities and the arousing of 
interests. But it is evident that the work of the school 
devoted to the fulfillment of these three groups of demands 
must find its chief problem in the practical organization of 
these three kinds of efforts. The school must readjust 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 383 

them to one another, must adapt the whole work to the 
limited powers, capacities and interests of the child ; it 
must correlate it to the given time and means, to the social 
conditions, to the demands of hygiene and health, to the 
home and to public life, to the preparation and abilities 
of the teacher as well as to the individual talents and in- 
clinations of the pupil. This most complex work of organi- 
zation certainly is at every step dependent upon the laws 
of mental life and a practical application of psychology is 
nowhere more essential in the educational field than here. 

Each of the three groups of educational influences de- 
mands work on the part of the pupil. AA^hether the child 
learns data to increase his knowledge or practices calcula- 
tions to develop his ability or reads literature to cultivate 
his feelings, he must exert effort in order to profit from the 
work. Thus the first question of economic organization 
may be how to secure the maximum of efficient work from 
the pupils. In the service of this problem the experi- 
mental psychologists have aimed to distinguish the influ- 
ences which training, fatigue, adjustment, effort, stimulus, 
interest and other psychophysical conditions exert on the 
amount of intellectual labor. If the problem is to be 
solved with the exactitude of the laboratory experiment, 
artificial conditions must be introduced which allow a 
standardizing of the work. The favorite material has been 
the adding of figures. If the rapidity of the process and 
the number of mistakes are measured when a child adds 
one figure to another through a continuous series during a 
long period, the fluctuations and changes can be deter- 
mined quantitatively. 

The profit from the training through repetition, from 
periods of rest, from the excitement of approaching the 
end and similar stimulations, will show as clearly as the 
loss through fatigue, through declining interest and 
through poor adjustment. No one overlooks the fact that 
such laboratory experiments are artificial without the rich- 



384 PSYCHOLOGY 

ness of a real school exercise, which offers far more stimu- 
lation than such a uniform, continuous task. The joy in 
the work under the conditions of a wholesome school life 
can introduce energies which are lacking under the con- 
ditions of the experiment. But as soon as these various 
factors are analyzed and clearly understood in their cor- 
relations, the results can be applied to the practical con- 
ditions of real school life, just as the simple memory ex- 
periments with nonsense syllables have proved suggestive 
in the learning of material which has a meaning. 

The most important influence of negative character is 
fatigue. No true success can be bought by the psycho- 
physical exhaustion of the pupils. Both the stages of 
fatigue and the most economic restoration of the mental 
energies can be examined by experimental methods. A 
frequently used test requires the children to fill blanks 
in a story. The printed page contains open spaces for 
syllables or letters which the child is to supply. His atten- 
tion to the content is needed in order to perform the task, 
and the rapidity and correctness with which the test is 
carried out indicate the degree of efficiency of those men- 
tal functions which are central in the regular school work. 
The fatigue of attention can also be quickly measured by 
determining the correctness of calculation. The mere 
rapidity of calculation may increase steadily, in spite . of 
the fatigue, because the influence of the training prevails, 
but the increase of the mistakes is far greater. Frequently 
indirect methods are applied which measure not the fatigue 
itself, but its psychophysical symptoms. 

The objective measurement of fatigue is pedagogically 
the more important, as the subjective feeling of fatigue is 
rather unreliable. A feeling of fatigue may come up 
habitually after a small amount of effort before any unde- 
sirable effect on the central nervous system is to be feared. 
The child who associates this illusory feeling of fatigue 
with all earnest labor must learn to overcome the slight 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 385 

weariness by new effort. On the other hand there are not 
a few who are liable to approach dangerous exhaustion 
without any marked feeling of fatigue. A neurasthenic 
disturbance may indicate later that the safety point was 
passed without any inner danger signal. The experiments 
seem to indicate that mathematics and those lessons which 
involve physical activity such as physical exercise and 
singing have the greatest fatiguing influence, next to them 
the languages, after them the naturalistic sciences, and 
then the technical subjects. "While the fatigue steadily 
grows, yet it is not wise to put the most difficult subjects 
into the beginning of the day as the first period is needed 
for the adjustment and warming up. But certainly the 
last hours of the day ought to be left for the easiest sub- 
jects. The younger pupils become fatigued much more 
rapidly than the older ones. But, above all, a pupil is 
the more fatigued by a piece of work the less able he is 
to master it. 

The influence of the pauses which are to overcome the 
fatigue offers new psychological problems. In themselves 
they restore the lost energy, and therefore the more pauses, 
the less fatigue. Yet at the same time the pause interferes 
with the adjustment which had been acquired, and the 
total effect of frequent interruptions may thus be more 
harmful than helpful for the work as a whole. The recre- 
ative effect of the recess decreases with the length of the 
preceding task, and the correlation between the restoring 
and the disturbing influence of the pauses demands subtle 
psychological study. A similar situation results from 
changing among various kinds of intellectual engage- 
ments. The transition from one subject to another or in 
the same subject from one way of treatment to another, 
like reading, speaking, hearing, writing, may involve both 
gain and loss. Unused energies enter into action and the 
children, after a short period of adjustment, may perform 
the new task with perfect freshness. But this advantage 



386 PSYCHOLOGY 

is outweighed by a distinct disadvantage, when the first 
subject is given up after too short a time. The psycho- 
physical setting is changed before its effect is reached. 
Experiments indicate that it is much more difficult to 
learn two different sorts of material in rapid alternation 
than to learn first one, then the other. 

Much less attention has been given to those influences 
which improve the work not by removing fatigue, but by 
stimulating the effort. Especially the psychology of pun- 
ishment and reward and of the whole disciplinary effect 
of authority, has not been made sufficiently accessible to 
the exact methods of the laboratory. We know that the 
efficiency can be whipped up by the fear of punishment 
or by the hope of reward, that the pressure of an exami- 
nation or of a competition can stimulate energies which 
are inactive under normal conditions and can produce 
inhibitions of counter-impulses and of fatigue feelings to 
an extraordinary degree. No school can be without such 
helpful influences of discipline, but their value after all 
lies not in the unusual effect which may be produced in a 
particular case through a punishment or an appeal. The 
chief psychological effect which an atmosphere of authority 
and serious discipline will produce is the training in the 
habit of continuous effort. The discipline must not lack 
elements of cheerfulness or discouragement will set in. 
But this cheerfulness must not interrupt the steadiness of 
the authoritative demand for serious effort. If a real 
habit of thoroughness and seriousness is to be formed in 
the interest of efficient work, there must be no exceptions 
and intermissions. Looseness of work and an undisciplined 
go-as-you-please method in occasional periods are not recre- 
ations from effort, but injurious disturbances of good intel- 
lectual habits. 

The Selection of Studies. — Utilitarian considerations 
put a premium on all those studies which appeal to the 
liking of the individual child and are from the start ad- 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 387 

justed to his natural personal interests. Such studies will 
easily hold his attention, will make his progress rapid, and 
may be practically useful for his later vocation. But while 
none of these considerations ought to be ignored, the edu- 
cator must not lose sight of the opposite group of facts. 
The studies which move along the path of least resistance 
in the child's mind are least fit to prepare him for the 
fulfillment of those demands which the drudgery and hard- 
ships of life will later make on his psychophysical ener- 
gies. He must have learned to devote his attention and 
effort to that which does not appeal to his involuntary 
response. The application of psychological principles cer- 
tainly -will not lead to the demand that studies be preferred 
which are repulsive to the tastes of the pupil, but the other 
extreme, which makes the whim and fancy of the pupil 
himself the decisive factor in the election of courses, is 
no less detrimental. The appeal to the spontaneous ener- 
gies and the training of the power of inhibition and of 
voluntary attention are equally needed. The organization 
of studies has to be a compromise between these two an- 
tagonistic psychological demands. 

The arrangement of studies in the compass of the school 
must count with still other, ultimately psychological con- 
ditions. The list of possible studies which might enlarge 
knowledge or help to train in abilities or to arouse inter- 
ests is of course limitless. The sociological conditions 
must be paramount in the selection. The child is to be 
educated for an efficient life in the community in which 
he is brought up, and that accentuates the need for cer- 
tain studies and eliminates many others. The preference 
for the literature of the mother tongue or for the national 
history or for the selection of foreign languages, has not 
psychological but sociological reasons. But progress from 
the simple to the more complex, from the elementary to the 
higher studies and at the same time the limitation to a 
few essential groups of studies in place of a superficial 



388 PSYCHOLOGY 

treatment of a large number, are determined by the struc- 
ture of the mind. 

It is again an adjustment to the mental conditions — 
and this forms the real center of the problems in the 
organization of studies — that each study is to he chosen 
so that it may serve as many educational purposes as 
possible at the same time. The material of instruction 
which enlarges knowledge can very well be presented in a 
form in which it stirs the enthusiasm, feeling motives and 
higher interests, and may furthermore be studied by meth- 
ods which train the child's abilities. There is no psycho- 
logical antagonism and no psychophysical interference 
among the acts which may fulfill these three groups of 
demands. On the contrary, they may reenforce one an- 
other. The emotional interest with its personal elements 
intensifies the attention by which the associative learning 
is facilitated. At the same time the emotion overcomes the 
inhibitory influences in the reactions. This secures the 
desired discharge and helps in the training of abilities. 

The problem of the choice of studies, finally, is inter- 
twined with the psychological question of specific training 
in the interest of general training. If it were psycholog- 
ically true that mental training in one sphere left every 
other sphere untouched, studies serving formal discipline 
would have to be eliminated from the curriculum. But 
while it is undoubtedly true that the value of such trans- 
ference of effect was exaggerated in the popular educa- 
tional psychology of earlier days and that many of those 
claims had to be abandoned upon experimental examina- 
tion, the phenomena of cross-education must certainly be 
acknowledged. The transference of training in one field 
to other fields has been demonstrated experimentally in a 
large number of different regions of mental life. We know 
that practice with sound stimuli increases sensitivity to 
tactual and visual stimuli. Discrimination of sound inten- 
sities carries with it the ability to discriminate inten- 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 389 

sities of brightness. Space discrimination by the finger 
tips of one hand gives training for discrimination by the 
other hand. Practice in rapidity of tapping and exacti- 
tude in fencing become effective for the unpracticed hand. 
The training for neatness in one group of studies proves 
helpful for neatness in any other group of studies. The 
training in the inhibition of distractions in one situation 
teaches the pupils to ignore them in others. The training 
in learning poetry makes the children more able to learn 
prose with ease. The training of the memory for non- 
sense syllables is highly effective in strengthening the 
power to learn numbers, stanzas, and poetic forms. Ex- 
periments in these and many similar directions in recent 
years leave no doubt that the educator may very well rely 
on the training in one mental power through the training 
in another. But the experiments make it rather evident 
too that the effect is the stronger the more the two functions 
have common elements or are bound together by an over- 
lapping mental function. 

Adjustment to Individual Differences. — Until now, we 
have as far as possible abstracted from the individual dif- 
ferences of the children. Yet there is no school class 
which does not show different types of apperception, of 
imagery, of memory, of association, of attention, of feel- 
ing, of ability to learn from practice, of fatigue, of ability 
to recover from fatigue, of endurance, of suggestibility 
and of general intellect. Experimental pedagogy has so 
far done little in transforming the theoretical study of 
individual differences into educational schemes. There is 
no doubt that great difficulties stand in the way. Strictly 
individualistic education, entirely adjusted to the peculiar 
traits of the specific child, is practically impossible, and 
above all highly undesirable. The education in not too 
large classes is for many psychological reasons the most 
desirable. Pedagogical experiments have directly shown 
the advantage of class work over isolated work, and the 



390 PSYCHOLOGY 

effects of imitation and suggestion, of intercourse and 
social stimulation, which the class work furnishes, are of 
incomparable value. 

As soon as class w^ork is accepted in principle, a real 
adjustment of the instruction to tiie individual differences 
becomes impossible. It might not be difficult, as has been 
proposed, to separate classes of visualizers from classes of 
children with essentially motor or acoustic imagery, and 
to adapt the methods of teaching to their traits. In the 
visualizing class the teacher would be more successful, if 
he wrote the material on the blackboard; in the class of 
acoustic memorizers the teacher would rely on the spoken 
words ; and in the class of children with motor imagery he 
would insist on the motor activity of the pupils themselves 
in the interest of memorizing. But it is clear that such 
classes would at once combine very different types, for in- 
stance, of apperception, or of association, or of attention. 
The expansive and the focusing attention, the coordinating, 
the subordinating, and the superordinating tendency of as- 
sociation, the descriptive, the imaginative, and the scholarly 
appreciation, may go with any type of imagery. Children 
who are quickly fatigued, and those who are slowly fa- 
tigued, children who grasp quickly and those whose minds 
work sluggishly, may be distributed in every one of these 
classes. Each of the mental functions might furnish new 
principles of classification, and the principle of class work 
would practically have to be given up, if only children of 
identical combinations of mental traits were to be taught 
together. 

Moreover, the acknowledgment of the individual differ- 
ences is no sufficient basis for the claim that education 
must be made subservient to the given tendencies. If the 
task is only to teach the child a certain number of facts, it 
will be easiest to teach according to the method which ap- 
peals to his peculiar type of mind. But, if the task is to 
educate a child, the quickest method for imparting infor- 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 391 

mation may not, for that reason, be the wisest method for 
general training. It may be considered an important part 
of school work to bring to a certain development just those 
mental features wliich nature has provided Only in rudi- 
mentary form. Those who have the scholarly type of ap- 
perception ought to be trained in imaginative appercep- 
tion ; those whose attention is strongly focused ought to be 
trained in a certain expansion of attention; those who are 
inclined to subordinate in their associations ought to learn 
to superorclinate. 

It is different with the question of special talents. If a 
certain activity depends upon a talent, it is unwise to force 
a perfunctory performance on those who completely lack 
the disposition. Exercises in singing are of no help to 
those who are entirely unmusical. On the other hand, the 
conspicuously talented pupil is unfairly held back if he is 
obliged to proceed at the slow pace of the average pupil. 
The sharpest contrasts may be found in the talent for 
mathematics. 

In the center of pedagogical interest we find at present 
the prohlem of grading the general intelligence, which is 
to a high degree independent of the talent for special sub- 
jects. "We recognized before that the characteristic func- 
tion of intelligence is the ability to adjust one's mind to a 
task. The intelligence process should be cleanly separated 
from mere memory and imagination, association and atten- 
tion. We want to know how far the achievement of the 
individual pupil is dependent upon his ability to perceive, 
to learn, to retain, to discriminate, and so on, and how 
far it is controlled by that central function of general in- 
telligence. It is the one mental factor which is most sig- 
nificant for the later practical life, and one which ought to 
be considered most of all if the school work is to be ad- 
justed to individual differences. Many efforts have been 
made to find psychological tests by which the degree of 
this intelligence can be quickly determined. 



392 PSYCHOLOGY 

The value of these facts can be most easily discovered by 
studying the correlation between the results of a special 
test and the degree of intelligence which shows itself in 
the total work of a pupil throughout his school life. An 
experienced teacher with open eyes has, indeed, not much 
difficulty in ranking the pupils of his class according to 
their intelligence, without any reference to mere industry or 
good memory and similar functions, which the unintelligent 
may show, too. The test which seems best to correspond 
to this grading of the pupils by the teacher is an experi- 
ment in logical memory. If we read to a class a series of 
pairs of substantives, which have nothing to do with each 
other, like ''lamp" and ''oatmeal," and then read the 
first word of each pair, and ask the pupil to write down 
the second from memory, the results will show nothing but 
the strength or weakness of the mechanical memory. But 
if, instead of this, we choose pairs of words which are in- 
ternally connected, like "lamp" and "light," the results 
show, if the list is long enough, that the differences of 
memory are entirely superseded by the differences of in- 
telligence. The greatest number of pairs is remembered by 
those who are at the head of the graded list of the teacher. 

A decisive advance was made when, in recent years, a 
large number of such intelligence tests were graded in 
adjustment to different periods of life — the so-called Binet 
tests. If we find that a set of intellectual tests to be per- 
formed in a definite time offer such difficulties to normal 
children of eight years that more than a half of the tasks 
remain unfinished, while about three-fourths can be com- 
pleted by children of nine years, we have a definite stand- 
ard for the psychological examination of the intelligence 
at that age. If a child of seven is able to solve those prob- 
lems prepared for the children of nine, we have a case of 
supernormal intelligence. On the other hand, if a child 
of eleven can complete only the tasks for the nine-year-old 
class, and not those for his own age, we have a case of sub- 



EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 393 

normal intelligence. Many efforts have been made to im- 
prove these tests by eliminating as much as possible every- 
thing which depends upon the chance acquisition of knowl- 
edge, upon fluency of speech, and upon mere memory. 
Moreover, by the addition of little technical tasks which 
demand an intelligent adjustment, like the opening of 
boxes fastened by complex systems of bolts, the possibili- 
ties of the examination have been greatly enlarged. 

The tests cover the periods from the fifth year to the 
sixteenth. In the case of the five-year-old children the 
tests are as simple as the repetition of a sentence with ten 
syllables, the counting of a few pennies, the comparison of 
two weights, the copying of a square, the combination of 
a figure from two parts and so on. Children of six years 
are to repeat a sentence of sixteen syllables, to explain sim- 
ple conceptions, like ''fork," ''chair," "doll," to point 
to the left ear, to discriminate which is the prettier of two 
extremely different drawings of faces. The statistics of 
countries agree that in the circle of normal school children 
about 50 per cent, stand on the level of intelligence which 
the tests suggest, if we calculate that every child can be 
counted in the class in which he solves at least three- 
fourths of the test problems. About 20 per cent, of the 
children are one year behind, and 20 per cent, one year 
ahead ; about 5 per cent, are two or more years behind, and 
5 per cent, two years or more ahead. The intelligence of 
the boys and the girls seems essentially equal. 

The greatest value of these graded intelligence tests 
probably lies in the ease with which they allow the abnor- 
mal children, who are unfit for the usual class instruction, 
to be discriminated from the normal ones. Defective chil- 
dren can perform most of the tasks in the same order in 
which the ordinary children do. But the abnormal child 
falls more and more behind, and soon reaches a limit be- 
yond which he cannot advance. It is a hopeless pedagogi- 
cal effort by mere continuous repetition to force the defec- 



394 PSYCHOLOGY 

tive children to intellectual tasks for which their intelli- 
gence is insufficient. But such a careful standardization is 
just the way to find methods of appropriate instruction, 
even for those whose mental energies remain on the level 
of early childhood. Of course such children with organic 
defects in their psychophysical mechanism must be sharply 
distinguished from those whose intellectual achievement 
stands on a low level on account of external disturbances 
which may be cured. Poor hearing, defective vision, im- 
pediments of breathing and of circulation, may produce 
defects of apperception which only apparently put the 
children on the same basis as those whose inborn intelli- 
gence is abnormally low. 

We have spoken throughout about the psychology of the 
pupil. A real system of educational psychology ought also 
to leave room for the psychology of the teacher. The abil- 
ity to teach, and the ability to estimate the value of the 
pupil's v/ork, is a mental disposition which depends upon 
many psychological causes, and which cannot be replaced 
by mere intellectual interest. The psychotechnics of teach- 
ing has only recently been approached by the experiments 
of the psychological laboratory through studies on the con- 
stancy of decision and judgment, on the value of standards 
for the classification of handwriting or arithmetical work 
or compositions. It is the least developed part of educa- 
tional psychology, but the one which may ultimately be- 
come the most significant and most valuable aid in the im- 
provement of school life. 



CHAPTER XXX 
LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 

The Report of the Witness. — While tlie connections be- 
tween psychology and education are perfectly established, 
those between psychology and law are, to a certain degree, 
still loose and tentative. The contact between the two 
groups of interests is distinctly felt, and it cannot be other- 
wise, in view of the evident fact that the legal work re- 
fers to criminals, to witnesses, to plaintiffs and defendants, 
to judges, to juries, in short, everywhere to psychical per- 
sonalities. Hence the application of the results of scien- 
tific psychology to the problems of the court seems logical ; 
and, indeed, it has often been said that a consulting psychol- 
ogist may be as necessary in many trials as a chemical ex- 
pert in a poisoning case. Yet everything is still in an ex- 
perimental stage, and it lies in the nature of the situation 
that progress cannot be so swift as in the field of education. 
Any school principal can sanction a new educational 
scheme, and can try its efficiency, but the individual judge 
has not the right to make experiments with newmethods.- The 
whole mechanism of the court must necessarily work more 
slowly and in a more conservative spirit. But the ir.terest 
in the application of exact psychology to the problems of 
the court is steadily increasing, and at many a point it has 
begun to influence the actual legal life. A hasty develop- 
ment is certainly not desirable. 

"We must subdivide the material again under the point 
of view of the various practical purposes. We may dis- 
tinguish, accordingly, the purpose of getting evidence from 

395 



396 PSYCHOLOGY 

witnesses, of extracting the truth from the criminal, of 
improving the judicial activity, of preventing crime, and 
so on. Each of these problems is linked with a variety of 
mental functions. 'We said that we want to separate the 
examination of the witnesses and the examination of the 
criminal. But from a psychological point of view the de- 
marcation line ought to be slightly shifted. The funda- 
mental difference between the two groups is that, on the 
one side we may presuppose the intention to speak the 
truth, and on the other side to hide the truth. Yet it is, 
of course, not an infrequent case that the witness intention- 
ally lies, and the criminal is doing his best to bring the 
truth to light. Our first psychological problem is, accord- 
ingly, to criticize the evidence furnished by those who in- 
tend to speak the truth. 

The reports of the witness are always combinations of 
objective and subjective factors. Emotions, decisions, 
thoughts, may influence his account of the past experience, 
and, even where the interest is entirely devoted to the ex- 
ternal stimuli, the subjective apprehension and attention 
must play a role. It is possible that the original sensory 
perception was defective; or, secondly, that the apprehen- 
sion at the time of the perception was erroneous. Thirdly, 
the disposition for the memory images may have changed 
in the course of time so that a correct reproduction has be- 
come impossible. Fourthly, the will to reproduce the mem- 
ory ideas may not have been intense enough to overcome 
suggestions or autosuggestions or to secure completeness. 
Finally, the witness may have lacked the ability to express 
his ideas correctly. Only if the process were free from dis- 
turbances at all these points can the testimony count as an 
objective report. 

Each of these sources of mistakes can be examined by 
the psychologist. It is clear, however, that three different 
types of psychological facts must be considered. We must 
know the general laws of the mind which hold for every 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 397 

individual; we must, furthermore, know the particular 
facts which are true for the special group to which the 
witness belongs; and finally, we must know the mental 
equation of the particular individual. The first two kinds 
of knowledge may be gathered from a systematic treatise; 
the last can be gained only from the direct examination of 
the special person. "We may learn, for instance, the men- 
tal laws of suggestion and suggestibility, and apply them 
to any witness. We may also learn, in a general way, that 
women are more suggestible than men, and that children 
are especially suggestible. If the witness is a little girl, 
we must make full use of this general information. But 
this cannot relieve us from the duty of examining the 
special degree of suggestibility of a suspicious witness with 
all the help of psychological experiments. It is quite pos- 
sible that in the special case the particular girl may be 
very slightly suggestible, or may even show traits of nega- 
tive suggestibility. 

The starting point is the original perception. We have to 
consider here all the data which the psychology of the 
senses, of perception and apperception, has furnished. It 
may be sufficient to recall the optical, acoustical and tac- 
tual illusions, which refer to the sense qualities and intensi- 
ties, as well as to their spatial and temporal grouping. It 
may often be important for the court to know that a time 
interval appears longer or shorter, according to the differ- 
ent ways of filling it; that observations made through a 
keyhole demand corrections with regard to size ; that colors 
cannot be recognized in faint light ; that the recognition of 
sound direction is subject to definite illusions. If the wit- 
ness testifies that he heard a cry in the night in front of 
him his report has small value; he cannot be sure that 
the cry was not emitted behind him, as no one can discrimi- 
nate from which of these two directions a sound comes. 
These typical facts of mental behavior are shaded by the 
varying tendencies of perception, of attention, of respon- 



398 PSYCHOLOGY 

siveness to special sense material, of discrimination and of 
judgment. The good visualizer may have observed care- 
fully the physiognomies and the dress of the persona in a 
scene he witnesses, but may have given very little attention 
to the conversation he heard. 

Memory and Suggestibility of the Witness. — The most 
frequent condition for errors is not the faulty appercep- 
tion at the time of the original experience, but the defec- 
tive reproduction. The disturbance may begin with in- 
fluences immediately after the perception. We have dis- 
cussed before the fact that a severe interference with the 
inner settling of the memory material may destroy the 
memory dispositions. The extreme case is that of retroac- 
tive amnesia after a blow on the head. The absence of 
memories which, under natural conditions, would certainly 
have been kept in mind is therefore to be expected, if im- 
mediately after the impressions strong emotional excite- 
ments have broken into the mental life. We may even 
reverse this statement. If testimony contains subtle de- 
tails concerning an experience which was immediately fol- 
lowed by strong excitement, for instance, observations be- 
fore an accident, the report of the witness is psychologi- 
cally suspicious. It is probable that much of it consists of 
unintentional, imaginary additions. 

The studies of memory and of association and the analy- 
sis of the relative importance of frequency, recency, vivid- 
ness and constellation for the reproduction of memory im- 
ages can be made serviceable at many points. Experiments 
which were planned to bring the conditions as near as 
possible to actual life conditions have disclosed a falli- 
bility of the average mental mechanism which the naive 
observation had hardly suggested. Artificial dramatic 
scenes have repeatedly been rehearsed, the various stages 
photographed, the spoken words written out beforehand, 
and finally acted in the presence of educated observers, 
who did not know that the scenes were prepared before- 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 399 

hand. The witnesses believed that they were seeing a spon- 
taneous quarrel, or a chance fight, or the accidental intru- 
sion of strangers. Then they were asked to write out a 
full report. The results have uniformly been that 25 per 
cent, to 50 per cent, of the statements were erroneous, and 
that omissions falsified the results throughout. Even when 
such a scene was once acted in a meeting of a scientific 
academy, where jurists, psychologists and physicians of 
high scientific standing were the witnesses, while the presi- 
dent alone knew that the intrusion was an acted scene, the 
reports which he requested from all present showed that 
among forty only one man had forgotten less than 20 per 
cent, of the acts into which the whole scene could be decom- 
posed, twenty-six missed 20 per cent, to 50 per cent., and 
thirteen more than 50 per cent. Besides these omissions 
in twenty- four reports up to 10 per cent, of the statements 
were inventions, and in a fourth of the reports a far greater 
per cent, of the memories was directly wrong. The colors 
of the costumes were described with extreme variations, 
the time of the intrusion was estimated from a few seconds 
to many minutes. 

Other experiments have demonstrated that it is not even 
necessary that the witnesses be ignorant of the artificiality 
of the scene. Theatrical performances, played before edu- 
cated observers who knew that they were to give a detailed 
account, were reported by them with the same unsatisfac- 
tory results. An experiment in which leading men of 
affairs took part, and which consisted of a simple scene in 
a broker's of&ce, played by four persons in a few minutes, 
showed that not a single one among twenty w^ell-known 
lawj^ers and bankers was able to reproduce the impressions 
with regard to the essential facts. The majority mad© 
from 50 per cent, to 60 per cent, omissions of the details, 
and substituted so many wrong statements that in many 
of the reports a third of the description was contrary to 
the facts. The psychological test becomes still simpler, if 



400 PSYCHOLOGY 

pictures of the ordinary picture-book type are shown, and 
afterward questions as to the number, the color, the form, 
the position, of the chief objects are asked. The use of 
this picture material most easily allows manifold varia- 
tions. "We can study with it in the laboratory the differ- 
ences between an undisturbed written report and a report 
on the basis of an oral examination, the influence of sug- 
gestive questions, the influence of artificially reenforced 
attention, the influence of the time interval between the 
seeing of the pictures and the delivery of the testimony, 
the influences of age, of sex, of vocation and of mental 
freshness. 

The experiments demonstrate, first of all, the extreme 
unreliability of the testimony of children, the strong sug- 
gestive effect of leading questions, the superiority of an 
undisturbed, spontaneous report to the testimony on exami- 
nation, the untrustworthiness of testimony about every- 
thing which w^s not the object of special attention during 
the experience, and, finally, the relatively small value of 
that reenforcement of attention during the giving of testi- 
mony which we expect from the oath. We may turn to a 
few details. To begin with the last, it is the common opin- 
ion that, where the will to speak the truth exists, the oath 
forces the attention on the details so strongly that directly 
wrong statements can be avoided. Experiments have fre- 
quently been made in the following form: Pictures were 
shown, and the subjects afterward made to describe all the 
details which they had observed. As soon as their report 
was completed, they were asked to underline those parts 
of their record on which they would be ready to take an 
oath. The average result is that the underlined descriptions 
are distinctly freer from errors and invented details than 
the not underlined ones, but that, nevertheless, the per- 
centage of mistakes in these reaffirmed statements is only 
50 per cent, lower than that of those records which ap- 
peared to the witnesses as uncertain. Where about twenty 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 401 

mistakes slip into an offhand description of a hundred de- 
tails, we may expect that the witness will be ready to swear 
to the correctness of a revised statement which still con- 
tains about ten definite errors, some of which may refer 
to important parts of the material. 

On the other hand, we can deduce from the psychologi- 
cal experiment on testimony that the spontaneous report 
concerning experiences will suffer less from the passing of 
time than we are in the habit of supposing. That which is 
really well observed during the experience itself is reported 
after nine days almost as correctly as after three days. 
Only the details to which little notice was given from the 
start fade with the passing of time. Very suggestive psy- 
chological experiments have been carried on with refer- 
ence to repeated transmission of reports from one subject 
to another. They enable us to trace the tendencies in the 
steadily increasing changes. The accents of the reports 
become more and more exaggerated, subtle differences dis- 
appear, facts are omitted, and blanks are filled with arbi- 
trary inventions. The results throw an interesting light 
on the evidence based on rumors. 

Even the repetition of the testimony by the same ob- 
server lowers its value. Experiments indicate that the 
second report is often less based on the memory of the 
actual experience than on a mixture of experience and first 
report. Then the false additions in the first report are 
likely to be starting points for further illusions. But the 
laboratory tests show, also, that the ability to give correct 
reports can be systematically developed. If experiments 
are carried on in which the subject is required to give exact 
descriptions, the percentage of correct statements rises 
steadily. The results suggest that detectives and police- 
men might be trained in this necessary ability. 

As to the influence of questions in the taking of testi- 
mony, the experiments demonstrate that the number of de- 
tails which the memory produces can certainly be increased 



402 PSYCHOLOGY 

by questions, and, in some cases, even doubled. But the 
correctness and exactitude of the testimony decreases much 
more rapidly. This is to a certain degree the result of the 
hardly avoidable suggestive character of some of the ques- 
tions. This suggestive character of the inquiries can easily 
be intensified in the experiments. If a picture of a room 
is shown, in which there are two chairs by the w^all, and 
the child is later asked whether there were three or four 
chairs, he reports only in exceptional cases that neither 
three nor four were in the picture. 

Experiments make it clear that careful attention to the 
psychological conditions is needed to avoid every element 
of suggestion in the first gathering of evidence. But it 
has, furthermore, come out that suggestibility is not the 
only cause for wrong testimony. The ambition of the wit- 
ness to show himself and to boast of his knowledge may 
affect his evidence. The more a person is ready to express 
his correct knowledge, the less he is usually able to inhibit 
untrue answers. Suggestibility is the stronger, the younger 
the witness. Suggestive questions, which produced 50 per 
cent, of wrong answers from children of seven, succeeded 
only in 20 per cent, of the cases with boys of eighteen. 
The testimony of children before court must thus be pro- 
tected against suggestion to an especially high degree, and 
the spontaneous report of a child is always to be preferred 
to results from questioning. The identification of an indi- 
vidual by a young witness is also entirely unreliable. The 
suggestion is the more vivid, the more the emotions of the 
child, vanity, curiosity, ambition, and especially the secret 
interest in sexual facts, enter into the case. As to sex 
differences, the best modern experiments indicate that 
there is no characteristic difference between the testimony 
of men and of women. 

The Discovery of Hidden Ideas. — AVe distinguished be- 
tween the statements of those who try to express their 
ideas frankly and those who try to hide their thoughts. 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 403 

The witness who lies and swears falsely, or the criminal 
who tries to cover his guilty memories, offers an entirely 
new set of psychological problems. The results of the psy- 
chological laboratory in unveiling the shielded thoughts 
and emotions are so far much less available for the prac- 
tice of the court than those which refer to the sincere wit- 
ness. Nevertheless they form a significant chapter of legal 
psychology. 

Of course, the history of civilization shows at every age 
efforts to tear secrets from the soul of the defendant. The 
torture methods of olden times appear impossible in mod- 
ern law, not only because they violate the moral feeling, 
but partly also because it is recognized that their psycho- 
logical effect is uncertain. The pain overwhelms the will 
toward truth, innocent persons are accused by the tortured, 
the consciousness becomes confused, and products of imagi- 
nation are believed ; untrue confessions and self accusations 
by innocent persons are too likely to be the by-products of 
such cruel procedures. It can hardly be denied that, from 
a psychological standpoint, many modern methods of secur- 
ing confessions are for the same reasons unfit for the pur- 
pose. A long detention before the trial, fatiguing exami- 
nations, constantly repeated suggestive questions, and es- 
pecially threats and willfully applied emotional shocks are 
likely to produce in mentally weak individuals illusions and 
errors. 

The chances of bringing to light the true ideas of witness 
or criminal would be much greater, if hypnosis or hypnoid 
states could be induced. But here we have a typical case 
of the striking difference between the mere study of the 
means and the decision concerning the ends. The psycholo- 
gist would be sure that he could extract from the mind of 
the defendant the hidden facts on which the trial may 
hang. Yet, as we have always insisted, it is not his place 
to judge on the right or wrong of an aim. He can only say 
that it is possible to reach a certain effect, but whether it 



404 PSYCHOLOGY 

is desirable to reach it, he must leave to entirely different 
considerations, which lie outside of psychology. The appli- 
cation of hypnotism for the securing of confessions would 
be psychologically effective, but both for moral and legal 
reasons impossible. Yet psychologically many methods by 
which confessions are secured within the limits of law 
have decidedly the essential traits of a hypnotic influence. 
The exhaustion from sleepless nights and hunger, the fear 
of punishment, and the emotion of uncertainty greatly re- 
duce the resistance of the will, and thus create a state of 
increased suggestibility. If monotonous words, encourag- 
ing confidential talks and uniform sense impressions are 
added, the resistance crumbles, and the controlling idea of 
the truth discharges itself in confessions. 

Experiments of the psychological laboratory suggest that 
the truth can he tapped, even where no confession is ex- 
tracted. Daily life offers abundant opportunity to observe 
the unintentional expression of feelings. If we see how 
a person blushes or becomes pale at the mention of a cer- 
tain name, how tears enter into the eyes, the subject be- 
comes hesitating and the hand trembles, we take these 
signs to be indications of an inner excitement. Often we 
cannot only diagnose an excitement in general, but can 
clearly recognize the character of the emotion and dis- 
criminate fear or hope or shame or grief. A jury would 
certainly notice it, if the defendant, on being confronted 
by a certain person, or on hearing certain words, began to 
cr}^ or to tremble. It is a matter for the courts to decide 
whether or not it is suitable to substitute the refined meth- 
ods of the laboratory for these clumsy observations of emo- 
tional expression. 

Theoretically this is certainly possible. If, for instance, 
electrodes were put into the hands of the witness, then a 
galvanometer could easily show on the wall of the court- 
room the slightest fluctuation of his emotional mood. Any 
excitement, far too weak to be noticed by the ordinary ob- 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 405 

server, influences the sweat glands in the skin, changes by 
them the resistance to the galvanic current, and makes the 
needle of the galvanometer move. In a similar way the 
pneumograph records feeling influences on the respiration. 
Sphygmographic records of the influence of inner ex- 
citement on the pulse can tell with microscopic exactitude 
what the tears in the eyes or the trembling or the hasty 
breathing or the stammering speech show superficially. 
The practical danger of all these methods lies in the diffi- 
culty of diagnosing the particular character of the emo- 
tion. The mere excitement of the innocent may be wrongly 
interpreted as an emotion of guilt. Yet it is evident that 
in frequent situations no confusion would be possible. If 
among many photographs shown that of a suspected ac- 
complice awakens strong reactions, while the defendant 
claims never to have seen the man, there is no fear of mis- 
interpretation. 

The greatest psychological interest has been connected 
with a method which makes use of 'betraying disturbances 
in the association processes. It is a fact that the presence 
of memories with strong emotional character can deeply in- 
fluence the associative play of ideas. The usual scheme is 
to recite a long list of words, and to demand that the sus- 
pected defendant react as quickly as possible to each by 
speaking the first associated word which comes to his mind. 
Some of the words shouted to the subject stand in definite 
relation to the criminal action. The decisive symptoms of 
guilt are first that the association time is prolonged for 
those words which stir up emotional excitement, and the 
delay may even occur in the immediately following associa- 
tions. Furthermore, the associations themselves show 
traces of the hidden ideas, inasmuch as the emotional mem- 
ories have the tendency to push themselves into the fore- 
ground and to influence the selection of the associated ideas 
in a suspicious manner. Finally, if the same series of 
words is later called again, the harmless words awake es- 



406 PSYCHOLOGY 

sentially the same associations as the first time, but, wher- 
ever a sore spot of the mind is touched, a change occurs, 
and a new association replaces the old one, even if it were 
not likely to betray the subject. 

A similar method consists in reading to the defendant a 
report of the facts with certain characteristic blanks. He 
is requested to repeat this report after some time. If he 
has a fuller knowledge of the facts and tries to hide it, 
the details of the report fuse in his consciousness wdth his 
more expansive knowledge, and the result is that, when 
he tries to reproduce the fragments, the hidden parts will 
come to the surface. The value of these and other meth- 
ods has often been demonstrated in the laboratory experi- 
ments, but they are to-day hardly developed enough to be 
carried into the courtroom. Even if we abstract from all 
the legal difficulties, the psychological scheme itself must 
still be much further elaborated in order to secure a greater 
protection of the innocent. On the whole this group 
of methods may to-day render practical service better 
where the trustworthiness of the witness is to be ex- 
amined than where the guilt of the defendant is to be 
decided upon. 

The Court and the Criminal. — The psychological in- 
terest is certainly not confined to the methods of securing 
evidence. It may turn on the one side to the study of the 
legal factors themselves, the mental mechanism of the 
judge, the jury, the lawyer ; and the results may have prac- 
tical significance. The judge, for instance, has the free- 
dom to determine within certain limits the length of the 
sentence. Observations and statistics show that this de- 
cision is to a high degree dependent upon the psychological 
preference of the individual judge for particular figures. 
Years of detention in prison are added simply because the 
psychological mechanism of the individual judge automati- 
cally prefers one or another figure. Experimental tests can 
trace these tendencies, and a knowledge of them may well 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 407 

aid a conscientious judge in emancipating himself from 
these dangerous conditions. 

To choose an illustration from the problems of legal in- 
stitutions, the psychologists have studied the mental effect 
of discussions on the minds of the jurymen. The psycho- 
logical experiment in such a case does not introduce complex 
legal material, but some simple situation on which different 
opinions may exist, only one of which is correct. If a 
group of men is asked to form a judgment concerning the 
number of irregularly placed dots of various sizes on two 
walls, a hundred to be compared with a hundred and five, 
they may differ in their judgments which field has more 
dots. If every one writes down his opinion and then an 
extensive discussion brings out arguments in favor of the 
one or the other view, it can be shown that the number 
of correct judgments increases with the number of votes 
based on detailed discussion. The frequent argument that 
the discussion of the jury may suffer from the suggestive 
influences of those who are wrong is thus contradicted by 
the psychological experiments. 

On the other side the chief demand of the psychologist 
must be for a thorough psychological understanding of the 
mind of the criminal. Where the action is the product of 
insanity, the problem is one of psychiatry and not of law ; 
the paranoiac is not guilty of a crime. But, while his deed 
falls into the sphere of the physician, numberless shades 
of decreased responsibility must be discriminated and con- 
sidered by the judge and the jury. The mind of the en- 
tirely normal man may have been deprived of its efficient 
working power at the time of the deed, as the criminal may 
have been under the influence of chemical substances, 
drugs, alcohol, or he may have suffered from unusual emo- 
tional excitements or from overfatigue, or he may have 
been brought into a hypnoid state by monotonous stimuli. 
Each of these influences, which lower responsibility with- 
out excluding it, may have any intensity. Often the psy- 



408 PSYCHOLOGY 

chological experiment may be necessary to clear up the 
true situation. The mere knowledge of the objective condi- 
tions like the number of hours which a locomotive engineer 
had to work in succession before an accident occurred, or 
the number of cocktails which the defendant took before 
his violent deed, does not characterize the situation suffi- 
ciently. Everything depends upon the individual disposi- 
tion and the individual reaction to fatiguing or exciting 
stimuli. 

Not seldom it is asserted in the courtroom that direct 
hypnotic influence was responsible for the criminal deed. 
The psychologist must give a warning against the accept- 
ance of such a subterfuge. In the laboratory it is easy 
enough to perform hypnotic experiments, in which the 
subject kills his friends with paper daggers, but such ex- 
periments do not prove at all that in practical life hyp- 
notic suggestion can induce a morally upright person to 
commit a crime. While a foolish and even a slightly dan- 
gerous action can be forced on the hypnotized person, 
everything seems to speak against the theory that the re- 
sistance of a serious moral character can be broken down 
by a posthypnotic suggestion. In all those widely dis- 
cussed experiments a certain dim consciousness of the un- 
reality of the conditions probably remained. Only where 
the suggestion coincides with the latent criminal intention, 
it may succeed in breaking down the psychical resistance. 

These transitory influences which lower the responsibil- 
ity at the time of the crime are, however, not so funda- 
mental as the lasting conditions of low mentality. A large 
fraction of those who fill our prisons stand in the border- 
land region between mental health and mental debility. 
Experimental tests have often been applied. They must 
be carefully arranged in order not to include mental func- 
tions which are dependent upon acquired knowledge. Sim- 
ple acts of memory, of attention, of apprehension, of deci- 
sion, of emotion, must stand in the center of the research. 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 409 

Where such psychological tests have been made on prison- 
ers and on socially normal persons of the same age and of 
the same group, the much lower mental abilities of tho 
criminals have always become evident. A correct estima- 
tion of the crime is possible only if these mental conditions 
of the particular individual are known. This situation is 
repeated in civil law. Again we may abstract from real 
pathological disturbances and yet we must recognize the 
many shades of ability to dispose of one 's property and to 
make depositions. In questions of contracts and of damage 
or divorce suits and of legal disputes resulting from a sui- 
cide, the psychological facts must be carefully considered. 
Damage suits, depositions, contracts and last wills, too 
often involve psychological problems, for which the popular 
psychology of daily life is entirely inadequate. Memory, 
intelligence, ability to observe, to apprehend, to resist, de- 
gree of suggestibility and of will energy, ought to be deter- 
mined by experimental tests. 

Hence criminal laAv and civil law alike lead to the ur- 
gent question of the establishment of psychological insti- 
tutes in connection with the courts in which at the request 
of the court mental examinations of criminals, of witnesses, 
or of a party in a civil suit, can be carried out with the 
modern experimental methods. Only on the basis of such 
systematic psychological studies in the service of the court 
can a more ideal adjustment of punishment to the criminal 
personality be hoped for. Every psychologist knows how 
often the punishment is utterly ineffective, how often 
it leads even deeper into moral turpitude. The ex- 
perimental study of the effects of the various forms of 
punishment on the functions of the mind is only at its 
beginning. But the problems which d'emand solution are 
evident. 

Prevention of Crime. — Finally, the services which the 
scientific psychologist can render to the world of law must 
include the efforts to prevent crime through psychological 



410 PSYCHOLOGY 

influences. We have just spoken of one necessary step 
toward this end, the avoidance of penalties which drag the 
criminal still lower instead of reforming him. Yet even 
an ideal system of penal laws and penal methods would 
not be sufficient to reduce crime in the social community to 
the least possible amount unless other influences are added. 
The sociological psychologist would first of all indorse the 
eugenic demands which aim toward the elimination of the 
inefficient minds. The psychologist cannot accept the doc- 
trine which for a while had many followers, the theory of 
the born criminal. Nobody is necessarily predestined to 
become a criminal: but we have pointed out before that, 
according to the experimental tests, the criminals are 
mostly recruited from those human beings whose minds are 
in some respects deficient. 

The question of deficiency is always related to the social 
purposes. We do not call an individual deficient because 
he lacks the ability to paint or to recognize musical inter- 
vals, inasmuch as the artistic or the musical talent is not a 
social requirement. But, if an individual lacks the inhibi- 
tory power to suppress an impulse, or cannot produce asso- 
ciations quickly enough, or is disposed to develop emotional 
ideas so extremely strong that the normal effect of counter- 
ideas cannot stop them, or if his intelligence is not suffi- 
cient to foresee the effects of his actions, his conflict with 
the social surroundings is inevitable. No one of these de- 
fects has a definite relation to crime; each one would re- 
duce the chances of the individual in the struggle for so- 
cial existence at every point. But the probability is great 
that among the effects conflicts with the laws will be fre- 
quent. The family histories of the descendants of feeble- 
minded persons show an almost regular mixing of crimi- 
nals, tramps, idiots, imbeciles, drunkards and epileptics. 
If the community is to eliminate crime, it must first of all 
take care that as few psychopathically burdened persons as 
possible are born. The suppression of marriages between 



LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY 411 

feebleminded or otherwise mentally defective persons is 
accordingly a serious need. 

The more direct and more immediate method for the 
suppression of crime, however, is from the point of view of 
psychology the exclusion of everything which is a stimulus 
to crime, or which reenforces the impulse to crime, or 
which paralyzes the inhibitory mechanisms of the mind. A 
typical movement of this kind is the effort to reduce the 
consumption of alcohol and to strengthen the temperance 
habits of the population. The close relations between alco- 
holism and crime cannot be denied. The influence of alco- 
hol on the threshold for sensory impressions, on the mem- 
ory, and, above all, on the apprehension and the reaction, 
make this connection very natural. 

To be sure, the reactions become quicker and more vivid, 
but this is not an increase of efficiency. Its immediate ef- 
fect is the motor discharge without sufficient selfcontrol. 
It is this mental reenforcement of the reactions under alco- 
hol w^hieh produces the hasty insult or the blow which fol- 
lows a cutting word like a reflex before the normal inhibi- 
tion sets in. This lack of inhibition leads to serious crimes, 
reenforced by the dull apprehension which confuses the 
whole impression of the situation. The mere prohibition 
of alcohol is in itself no solution of the psychological prob- 
lem, as without a complete education to temperance the 
craving of mankind for excitement leads automatically to 
substitutes which may be no less dangerous in their social 
consequences. But the use of strong alcoholic drinks, like 
whiskey and cocktails, the use of alcohol in any form by 
persons under twenty years and by anyone whose nervous 
system is in any way defective must be absolutely sup- 
pressed, if the consequences of psychological observation 
are to be carried out. The effect of cocaine, which is much 
in use in criminal circles, is, of course, still more dangerous. 

The important fight against the misuse of alcohol must 
not obscure the fact that other social factors push the weak 



412 PSYCHOLOGY 

mind toward crime no less. The dime novel and every form 
of cheap detective literature and not less the vulgar ex- 
hibition of murder trials and divorce suits in the sensa- 
tional newspapers, are a constant source of mental poison- 
ing. The psychologist cannot too seriously point to the 
dangers which result from the automatic action of the 
mechanism for imitation. The laboratory experiment 
leaves no doubt that imitation is the strongest cause of 
motor action. It is ultimately the whole atmosphere of the 
law- violating community which creates the criminal im- 
pulse and reduces the inhibitions in the weak mind. Where 
graft and corruption, indulgence in violations of the law, 
lack of respect for the law and tardy or partial justice are 
habitual, the mental soil is prepared in which all the weeds 
of criminal ideas must grow rankly. 



CHAPTEE XXXI 
ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 

Psycho technics of Commerce and Industry. — It is sur- 
prising to see how late the contact between economic in- 
terests and scientific psychological studies was established. 
The industrial world, which strained all energies to make 
every possible use of the scientific progress in physics or 
chemistry, entirely ignored until a few years ago the re- 
sults of scientific psychology. The factories were supplied 
with the best machines, and the greatest care was taken to 
keep them at the point of highest efficiency, but nobody 
seemed to consider that the mind-brain apparatus of the 
workingman is the most essential element of the plant, and 
its efficiency the most momentous condition for the com- 
mercial output. Psychical functions, moreover, are essen- 
tial for the economic result, not only in the workingman 's 
case. The manager and the superintendent in the mill, 
the farmer in the field, the salesman in the store, are men- 
tal agencies, which cannot be left out of the calculation of 
economic results. And finally they all depend upon the 
purchaser whose mental functions decide upon the value 
of the offered goods. Every shop window, every advertise- 
ment, every label, is an appeal to human minds, and 
every improvement in the output of factories and mills is 
made to please some psychical individual. 

Since mental life plays such a significant role at every 
point in commerce and industry, it is astonishing, indeed, 
that the selfish interest of the men of affairs did not lead 
them to the door of the psychological laboratory. But, 

413 



414 PSYCHOLOGY 

while the application of psychology to the economic prob- 
lems was postponed unreasonably long, the rhythm of 
progress in the last few years suggests that the eagerness 
of the economic circles will quickly make up for the neg- 
lected opportunities. The pyschotechnics of commerce and 
industry to-day surely still stands far behind the psycho- 
technics of education. The literature is still meager and 
sporadic, in contrast to the extremely expansive writings 
on pedagogical psychology. But the community has begun 
to feel that the neglect of the psychical factors which enter 
into the material of production at a time when the psycho- 
logical laboratories are prepared for such work is an eco- 
nomic injury to public welfare which demands correction. 

The essential need is a development parallel to that in 
the educational field, and this means that the economic psy- 
chotechnics must no longer remain a mere by-product of 
general psychology. We recognized that the experimental 
work became valuable in pedagogy, because, after a first 
period of simply dragging the psychological results into 
the schoolroom, a second, better period, came, in which 
psychological studies were carried on in the direct interest 
of education. In the first period the problems were con- 
trolled by a theoretic interest in psychology, and the re- 
sults were later artificially adjusted to the practical needs. 
In the second period the problems themselves were formu- 
lated under the guidance of educational interests. This is 
the necessary development in every new field of psycho- 
technics. In the economic sphere we are only beginning to 
reach that second stage. Essentially the problems of the 
merchant and manufacturer must still be solved by a refer- 
ence to psychological facts which were found through ex- 
periments carried on for entirely different purposes. The 
true need is for scientific psychological studies from the 
point of view of the economic problem. 

The difficulties are certainly incomparably greater than 
those in the educational field. They begin with the endless 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 415 

diversity of the practical demands, compared with the far- 
reaching uniformity of the school work. Every trade, 
every factory, has its own groups of problems. The psy- 
chological conditions which hold for the textile worker are 
not those of the printer or of the steel worker. It seems 
doubtful whether the private initiative of the academic 
laboratories, which has mastered the pedagogical problems, 
will be able to adjust itself to the endless manifoldness of 
the economic questions. In the interest of national com- 
merce and industry, governmental research institutions 
ought to be devoted to these psychological studies in the 
same way in which, in the interest of the farmer, govern- 
mental agricultural stations clear up the chemical or bo- 
tanical problems. On the other hand, it is only natural 
that the manufacturer and business man, since their eyes 
have been opened to the new vista, are anxious to have 
their private establishments studied and aided by psycho- 
logically trained experts. The result is a rapid develop- 
ment of the new profession of the consulting psychologist. 
The Selection of the Industrial Worker. — The one psy- 
chological problem which seems most significant, and for 
the solution of which the method of experimental psychol- 
ogy can hardly be replaced by any other, is the mutual ad- 
justment of mental personality and practical work. The 
individual needs the place for which his mental disposi- 
tions make him fit, and the work demands the individual 
whose abilities secure his success. Two independent "move- 
ments lead to the threshold of this psychological problem. 
On the one side, the well-known effort of scientific manage- 
ment necessarily suggested an increased interest in the 
mental make-up of the individual worker. The students of 
scientific management themselves did not undertake any 
researches in experimental psychology, and were hardly 
aware of the progress which modern psychology has made 
in its laboratories. But their work led to the point at 
which the necessity of a systematic psychological study be- 



416 PSYCHOLOGY 

came evident. Their time-measuring analysis of the com- 
ponents which enter into an industrial achievement and 
their painstaking motion study, with their persistent search 
for the man who can perform the prescribed task in the 
prescribed time, demands as a necessary supplement the 
experimental investigation of individual mentality. 

At the same time the social movement toward vocational 
guidance arose. Boys and girls, on leaving school, were to 
be advised as to the most appropriate work for them. The 
methods of experimental psychology were, on the whole, 
foreign to the vocational counsellors, too, and, where mental 
states were tested, it did not go beyond a dilettantic ap-r 
proach. The advice was essentially based on demand and 
supply, wages, health and hygiene, necessary knowledge, 
but, least of all, on objective mental dispositions. Accord- 
ingly, scientific management and vocational guidance alike 
stopped before the methods of experimental psychology 
were reached. But both had turned public attention suc- 
cessfully to the fundamental problem of choosing the right 
economic lifework. They had approached it, to be sure, 
from two different sides. The scientific manager seeks the 
best man for the work ; the vocational counsellor seeks the 
best work for the man. The experimental psychologist 
combines these interests, and makes the methods of the psy- 
chological laboratory subservient to the question. He is 
aware how much personal unhappiness results from the 
steady friction between abilities and demands, and how 
poorly the work of the world is done, because too few 
men stand in the place where they might do their best. 
Everything seems to be a haphazard scattering of boys and 
girls who rush into chance paths, discovering too late that 
they are only blind alleys. 

A first step toward the recognition of psychological fit- 
ness for particular work is a careful inquiry into the 
sources of greatest satisfaction. This is certainly not 
enough. A boy may believe that he likes an occupation 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 417 

very much, and yet may be entirely unfit for it. Some ex- 
ternal features may attract his imagination, while the real 
inner requirements may be hardly known to him, and may 
offer growing difficulties if he turns that way. Some work 
for which he is splendidly prepared by his inborn disposi- 
tions may appear to him tiresome, or even repellant, as 
long as he has only a superficial acquaintance with it. Yet 
for a first orientation even this inquiry into the feeling 
reactions may give valuable hints. It brings out at least 
the mental variations, and it is the more helpful the more 
the individuals examined have come into actual contact 
with different lines of work. But a careful observation 
can add many other features, even without any experi- 
mental research. 

A mental analysis of this kind, for instance, was under- 
taken at the University of Cincinnati on the feelings of 
five hundred students in the engineering department. 
They were engaged in practical work in manufacture, con- 
struction and transportation. Their marked characteris- 
tics, as they appeared at work, were classified. It was 
found that a number of men maintained good grades in all 
school work, but were utter failures at everything which 
required manual exactitude and vice versa. If a man seeks 
a place, we ought to know whether his type is that of head 
efficiency or hand efficiency. Another discrimination re- 
ferred to the type of men who are settled and the type who 
are roving. One complains if there is no continuity to 
the work, and the other if there is not enough variety. 

The next line of separation was drawn between the in- 
door and the outdoor men. Again there are some men who 
naturally assume responsibility, and others who just as 
naturally evade it: the directive and the dependent men. 
Quite distinct from this difference we find that between the 
original men and the imitative men. The original man is 
full of suggestions, but may be unable to carry them into 
effect ; the directive man knows how to realize them. A 



418 PSYCHOLOGY 

characteristic difference of men refers to their liking for 
tasks of large dimensions, or for subtle, fine, intricate oc- 
cupation. The one may like to build bridges, and the other 
to repair watches. Some men are easily adaptable, others 
are selfcentered and remain the same under all circum- 
stances. Some show great accuracy ; others inaccuracy, and 
this is true of manual as well as mental work. Some show 
rapid, others very slow, mental coordination. Some are 
deliberate at their work and some impulsive. 

The Adjustment by Experimental Methods. — Faithful 
observation of these and similar mental contrasts would 
certainly be helpful in leading young people to the right 
places, or at least in making them avoid the entirely inap- 
propriate work. But it certainly cannot aolve the true 
problem of an exact adjustment, and, if possible, of an 
adjustment before the work itself is tried and has led to 
disappointment, dissatisfaction, and failure, by which 
often the whole career is ruined. A boy may enjoy quite 
well the idea of being a typesetter in a printing office, and 
he may show himself industrious in performing the work 
of the first few months. Yet, after years of training, he 
may discover that he can never reach the rapidity with 
which some others set the type, and that he will stay far 
behind the average in the wage scale. His mental mech- 
anism does not allow him to reach the desirable speed, be- 
cause his reactions are not quick enough. Then it is too 
late to change his trade. Exact psychological laboratory 
measurements in thousandths of a second might have shown 
his inability before he ever started on the long way, and 
might have saved years of unsuccessful training. 

But, in order to develop such exact methods, it is evi- 
dently not enough to devise schemes for the analysis of 
every elementary mental function, and for the measure- 
ment of their particular combinations. The no less essen- 
tial condition is the resolving of the technical work itself 
into its component parts from a psychological point of 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 419 

view. Two functions may be technically quite similar and 
yet psychologically composed of very different factors. The 
mere devices for measuring the mental states may be sup- 
plied ready-made by the theoretical laboratory of the 
psychologist. But the psychological analysis of the 
vocational activities demands direct psychotechnical 
research. 

The efforts of this type are still scattered, and refer to 
only a few activities. The real factory work has hardly 
been approached in this way at all. Considering that, un- 
der the room of one factory, even when only one product is 
manufactured, only watches, or shoes, or incandescent 
lamps, sometimes thousands of different functions are per- 
formed, it is evident that the task is not small. Yet sys- 
tematic classification will simplify it greatly, if the classi- 
fication is made from a purely psychological point of view. 
Not the similarity of the material, but the similarity of the 
mental situation, is decisive. The external motion studies 
and time studies of the efficiency engineers will certainly 
prove to be helpful contributions toward the psychological 
undertaking. 

Such really psychological work has been carried out in a 
few groups of technical work. Experiments were made to 
study the fitness of telephone operators for the complex 
service which presupposes a particular combination of 
attention, association, memory, discrimination, accuracy of 
impulse, and general intelligence, besides mental endur- 
ance and energy. Thousands spend long periods of train- 
ing in this difficult work, only to discover that their nat- 
ural mental disposition does not prepare them for this oc- 
cupation. Each of those partial functions involved de- 
mands experimental examination. The fluctuations of at- 
tention were tested by a long-continued crossing out of a 
letter in printed text ; the intelligence by testing the mem- 
ory for logical associations ; the rapidity of mind by meas- 
uring the association times, and so on. In this case every- 



420 PSYCHOLOGY 

thing depended upon the resolution of the complex func- 
tion into its elements. 

As a typical case of an entirely different way of ap- 
proach, the work of the motormen on street railways may 
be cited. Many simple mental processes enter into that 
work. Yet the essential ability consists in the power to 
combine continuous attention with an impulse to quick re- 
action, and with a certain imagination by which the move- 
ments of pedestrians and vehicles are foreseen. It is the 
lack of this power which leads to the death of hundreds 
and to the injury of thousands every year. ,It is of decisive 
importance to recognize the presence of this mental ability 
before a man is accepted for such service. From a psycho- 
logical point of view the need is, of course, not to experi- 
ment with real electric cars, or still less, with miniature 
cars on the laboratory table. The necessary requisite is 
a situation in which exactly those mental energies 
are aroused which are characteristic of the electric railway 
service. 

The experiments were, therefore, carried out with an 
apparatus in which, by the subject's turning a crank, a 
large variety of black and red figures passed by. These 
figures were at different distances from a central double 
line which represented the track. Several complicated re- 
lations of those figures had to be noticed on the passing 
screen, and the arrangement made it possible to discover 
when they were overlooked. The number of mistakes and 
the rapidity of the turning of the crank were measured. 
The experienced motormen felt, in carrying out this experi- 
ment, that the mental attitude was indeed quite similar to 
that of their function on the street. It was possible by this 
method to find out in a few minutes which men possessed 
the mental requisites and which did not. One of these 
two methods will probably be needed for every vocational 
analysis through psychological experiment. Either the 
complex function is divided into its parts, whenever these 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 421 

parts are relatively independent in the active performance, 
or the situation as a whole is artificially copied on a re- 
duced scale, whenever the success depends upon the special 
cooperation of all factors. It is evident that many a test 
will be suitable to cover a variety of vocational activities. 

The Apprentice. — While the study of individual fitness 
for economic work is perhaps the most stimulating problem 
of economic psychotechnics, other groups of questions seem 
much nearer to a satisfactory answer, because they can 
profit more from the results of general psychology and are 
less dependent upon specific tests. "We may start from the 
problems of industrial learning and training. Many of the 
general studies and of the pedagogical researches on the 
development of abilities can be directly applied to the 
questions of the workshop and the factory. The problem is 
to bring the individual to the greatest possible efficiency. 
This certainly does not mean simply to whip up the nervous 
system to more intense effort. The increase of economic 
achievement by merely spurring the will is ultimately as 
pernicious for the employer as for the psychically over- 
fatigued employee. 

The chief point is to discover the most effective methods. 
They may appear more difficult at the beginning than the 
usual ones, but, as soon as the first learning is completed, 
the more complex activity which secures the higher output 
does not offer greater difficulties. Whoever learns type- 
writing without instruction finds it much easier to strike 
the keys with his two first fingers only. If he keeps his 
eyes on the keys, as seems natural to the beginner, he will 
soon reach a certain speed in writing. On the other hand, 
those who are obliged by the teacher to use from the start 
not two, but all ten fingers, and not to look at the keys, 
will need a much longer time for learning, and will have to 
fight with much greater difficulties. But, after some time, 
they will surpass those who stick to the two-finger method, 
and may soon reach a speed which would not have been 



422 PSYCHOLOGY 

possible with the primitive method. Yet this much more 
rapid writing will not demand any greater effort. On the 
contrary^ the correct connections have been formed so 
firmly that the performance is much more automatic and 
the work, while it is quicker, produces less fatigue. 

The essential point for all learning of industrial activi- 
ties is the acquiring of psychophysical habits by which 
groups of muscle contractions are consciously or uncon- 
sciously organized in the most economic way. The most 
immediate influence is produced by mere repetition. The 
movements become more exact and more rapid by being 
repeated, and the effect can also be found in the symmetri- 
cal muscle groups of the other half of the body and in the 
neighboring muscle groups. Only after long-continued, 
onesided training the psychophysical energy of the not- 
used half of the body may finally suffer. The most care- 
ful studies of the laboratory have been devoted to the learn- 
ing of simple technical performances like typewriting and 
telegraphing. The rapidity of transmitting telegrams 
grows faster and more uniformly than the speed of receiv- 
ing, but, while the latter rises more slowly and more irreg- 
ularly, it finally surpasses that of transmitting. 

The ability to receive telegrams shows not far from the 
beginning a characteristic period during which no progress 
can be noticed, and a similar period occurs at a later stage. 
In these periods without advance the elementary habits are 
almost completely formed, but have not become sufficiently 
automatic. The attention is not yet ready to start habits 
of a higher order. The apprentice begins correlating single 
letters and then syllables. Then he stops, because he must 
learn to master more and more new material, until his 
telegraphic vocabulary is large enough to make it possible 
for him to receive every word at one grasp. As soon as 
this new habit has been made automatic by a training of 
several months, he can advance to a higher level, on which 
whole groups of words are perceived as telegraphic units. 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 423 

After years, and often quite suddenly, a last new asset 
can be noticed: whole sentences are understood automati- 
cally. 

Investigations of this kind must be made independent of 
subjective impressions. Every element of the function 
must be objectively registered. The studies of the learn- 
ing of typewriting, for instance, were carried on with 
a typewriting machine, in which every key had electric 
connections, and a system of levers registered their move- 
ments on the rotating drum of a kymograph. Each strik- 
ing of a key, each completion of a word or of a sentence, 
each glance at the copy was recorded in exact time rela- 
tions. Studies referring to the training of girls in sewing 
were made with complex devices by which every stitch 
moved a combination of levers. The objective results then 
consist not only of the sewing work itself, but of an exact 
graphic record of every movement of the sewing hand. On 
the other side, these objective registrations must always 
be accompanied by thorough introspective observations. 
The experiments, therefore, can be made only with sub- 
jects well trained in psychological self observation. 

Very few researches of this kind have so far been car- 
ried out. Yet this painstaking psychophysical analysis of 
the development is the only way to discover the best 
method of acquiring skill for an industrial task. To stick 
to the traditional schemes of so-called common sense is 
often most uneconomic. The one method which is ulti- 
mately the best is always the only one which ought to be 
applied from the beginning. But to find it involves in- 
deed the most careful consideration of the repetitions and 
of the pauses, of the process of imitation and effort, of the 
exercise in parts of the movements and of the special com- 
binations, of the rhythm of the work and the secondary 
feeling motives, and of many similar influences which may 
shape the process of learning. 

The Technic. — Another aspect of the psychotechnics 



424 PSYCHOLOGY 

of industry is the adaptation of the technical apparatus to 
the mental conditions. The whole history of technic, to 
be sure, is one great record of this adjustment. Mankind 
has always instinctively tried to change the technical work, 
so that the mental energy could be saved as much as pos- 
sible. Coordinated motor impulses were preferred, mental 
interferences were avoided, and especially rhythmical im- 
pulses were introduced, as they allow a psychophysical set- 
ting through which the effect of the mental impulse is 
strongly increased. Any rhythm involves a repetition of 
movements without demanding a real repetition of the 
psychophysical impulse. The first excitement still partly 
serves for the second and the second for the third. But 
all these psychological motives were realized only by in- 
cessant trials with an immense waste of effort. Real at- 
tention was given only to the improvement of the machin- 
ery as such, and men merely had to serve the require- 
ments of the most efficient apparatus. 

The new movement of psychotechnics aims toward 
bringing this adjustment consciously into the foreground 
and toward testing systematically to ascertain what varia- 
tions best suit the psychological conditions of men. The 
well-known efforts of the scientific management engineers 
toward the improvement of the technic of bricklaying 
and of shoveling, contributed excellent examples of ad- 
justing traditional forms of tools to the psychophysical 
needs. If everything is lifted with the same shovel, the 
individual will be exhausted too soon, when the material is 
too heavy, and will waste his energies, when it is too light. 
It was necessary to determine the weight which could be 
lifted with every shoveling movement without overfa- 
tigue and without waste of impulse. As soon as this was 
found to be twenty-one pounds, ten different kinds of 
shovels could be used for ten different materials — small 
ones for heavy, large ones for light substances. With this 
improvement it was possible in large steel works to have 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 425 

the shoveling on which five hundred laborers had been 
engaged done by only a hundred and forty, whose wages 
could be raised by two-thirds. 

Yet such practical attempts by scientific management 
can only blaze the way. The subtler work needs the sys- 
tematic experiment of the psychological laboratory. Ex- 
act studies, on attention, for instance, must settle how 
the various parts of machinery should be distributed, if 
the laborer must keep watch for disturbances at various 
places. Often the adjustment must have individual char- 
acter. It is a waste of energy for the user of a typewrit- 
ing machine to select a typewriter which is not attuned 
to his individual mind. The shift-key machine and the 
double-keyboard machine, for instance, involve very dif- 
ferent mental faculties. 

The influence of colors, of sounds, of noises, of tactual 
impressions, of humidity, of temperature, of odor, of 
quick changes, of movements, of size and number of stim- 
uli, has hardly been considered as yet from the stand- 
point of exact psychology. Every experimental investi- 
gation along such lines opens wide psychotechnical vistas. 
The technical work may be deeply affected by the colors 
of the surroundings, by the character of the signals, by 
the position during work, by the filling of the pauses, by 
pleasant or unpleasant distractions, hy continuity or in- 
terruption. Only the experiment can demonstrate what 
rhythm of movements is the mentally most economic. It 
can be shown, for instance, that the greatest exactitude of 
rhythmical movements demands different rapidity for dif- 
ferent actions. Every muscle group has its own optimum 
of rapidity for the greatest possible accuracy. 

Monotony and Fatigue. — The practically most impor- 
tant problem in this field is that of uniformity of move- 
ment. Everybody who thinks about the needs of our time 
is impressed by the evil of monotony, which seems so un- 
avoidable in our modern industry. Much of our social 



426 PSYCHOLOGY 

unrest is the direct result of the widespread denunciation 
of this economic wrong. Yet the whole social-ethical atti- 
tude is based on general impressions, and not on exact 
studies of the mental processes which enter into uniform 
work. Uniformity of work appears to us as monotony 
after all, only when we dislike it. The psychologist must 
examine whether this dislike is necessary, or whether it is 
not simply a prejudice. Since the attention of the scien- 
tist has been directed to this much misunderstood feature 
of industrial work, the results strongly suggest that the 
popular idea, which is recklessly hammered into the minds 
of the masses, is fundamentally wrong. Uniformity is 
disagreeable to some minds and agreeable to others. 

The laboratory experiment leaves no doubt that there 
are fundamental differences in this respect among indi- 
viduals of every group. The complaint of monotony is 
therefore not confined to the workingmen, but can be 
heard from men and women of all vocational groups, if 
they are temperamentally averse to uniformity, which 
cannot be excluded from any field of work. But, as many 
other men and women gain satisfaction from the same 
kind of work, because uniformity is in harmony with 
their mental tendencies, the workingman, too, when he is 
not in the power of artificial theories, may enjoy the regu- 
lar repetition of his activity more than any variety. Some 
minds exhaust their energy for a particular function in 
carrying it out once, and therefore prefer change. If 
they are forced to repeat the first action it needs a stead- 
ily growing effort which becomes intolerable. But there 
are others with whom going through the action once pro- 
duces a setting which prepares for the repetition, and 
makes it more natural, more pleasant. Any friction is 
reduced, and the uniformity is most welcome. In every 
walk of life some are inclined toward innovations and 
others toward continuity. The one mental tendency is 
not better than the other, any more than a visual memory 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 427 

is better than an acoustical memory. Desire for change 
and loyalty to tradition are equally important for human 
civilization. 

The question of monotony must be cleanly separated 
from that of fatigue. Fatigue is unpleasant under any 
circumstances, but it may result from the work full of 
changes, as well as from the uniform work. No psycho- 
logical factor demands such careful study in the interest 
of the workingman, as well as in that of the employer. 
The various kinds of fatigue and exhaustion, the condi- 
tions of restoration, the pauses at work, and the speed of 
work in its relation to fatigue, offer an abundance of prob- 
lems of which only a few have been studied experimen- 
tally so far. The laboratory experiments have been essen- 
tially confined to the fatigue from mental labor. They 
have successfully shown the great individual differences 
of exhaustibility, of ability to recover the lost energy, of 
ability to learn from practice, and so on. But correspond- 
ing experiments on the individual differences of fatigue 
and restoration after physical work hardly exist as yet. 
The practical studies in the service of scientific manage- 
ment, however, have clearly demonstrated that a careful 
adjustment of pauses to the different kinds of physical 
work can lead to an increase of output far beyond that 
secured by any enforcing of more work by artificially 
whipping up the mind with promises of extraordinary 
wages. 

It was found, for instance, when the work of the pig 
iron handlers was examined that their maximum efficiency 
for the usual loads of ninety pounds was secured when 
thej^ were not allowed to work more than 43 per cent, of 
the working day, being entirely without load 57 per cent. 
Under such regulation the men who were ordinarily un- 
able to carry more than twelve tons a day were able to 
carry forty-seven tons without greater fatigue. As far 
as the fatigue depends upon the length of the working 



428 PSYCHOLOGY 

time the changes in the factories had themselves experi- 
mental character. It was recognized that a decrease of 
the working day from ten to nine hours did not involve 
a loss, as the mental efficiency in each of the nine hours 
proved so much greater than in the exhausting ten-hour 
day. 

A very significant account of the changing conditions 
of fatigue during the working day can be gathered from 
the official statistics of accidents, which are distributed 
with an uncanny regularity. Yet they show that the lack 
of attention which finds its expression in the increase of 
accidents is not the product of fatigue alone. The last 
hour of the working day is not the one in which the great- 
est number of accidents occur. The feeling of the ap- 
proaching end restores the energies. The whole interplay 
of factors which influence in this way the attention of the 
workingman, for instance, the influences of conversation, 
music, noises, alcohol, coffee, tea, tobacco, wage premiums, 
evening entertainments, home dreariness, outside activi- 
ties and reading, are strictly psychological problems, 
which have hardly been approached with the means of 
science. The neglect of a systematic study of these funda- 
mental conditions for economic success, which is at the 
same time a social and national success, stands in regretta- 
ble contrast to the earnestness with which the methods 
of physics and chemistry are applied for the techni- 
cal part of industrial life. The psychotechnical questions 
are simply answered by common sense, which too often 
means misleading prejudice and unwise tradition, result- 
ing from a chance development which may have grown 
up under entirely different conditions. 

The Interests of Commerce. — If the word commerce 
may designate for us the whole realm in which buying 
and selling turn the social wheels, the world of commerce 
is surely a sphere of mental activity. The marketable ob- 
jects of commerce, their production, their distribution, 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOaY 429 

their relative values may be described from the point of 
view of the economist, or the sociologist, or the geogra- 
pher, or the naturalist, but ultimately everything hinges 
on the subjective interests and needs of the buyer and 
seller. Thus the psychologist stands nearest to the essen- 
tial factors in commerce, and psychotechnical advice is 
needed. The fact that very little attention has been given 
to the mental elements involved is probably to a high de- 
gree responsible for the often observed contrast between 
commerce and industry. While the industrial life, in 
which machinery is so prominent, was forced by the prog- 
ress of natural science into entirely new molds during the 
last century, commercial life has remained practically un- 
changed in its principles. Only in most recent times a 
conscious study of psychological conditions has begun to 
bring method and system into much which had been left 
to a haphazard development. 

The psychology of advertising may be referred to as a 
clean illustration of the detailed experimental work which 
can be devoted to such problems of commerce. A large 
number of careful experimental investigations on the 
question of how printed advertisements influence the mind 
of the reader have been carried out in the psychological 
laboratory, and have begun to shape the practical endeav- 
ors. Measured by the amount of expenditure, advertising 
has become one of the largest industries of the world. 
Each advertisement is an instrument constructed to pro- 
duce certain mental effects. It is to draw the attention, 
to awake the interest, to impress the memory, to arouse 
an impulse. For every one of these mental influences cer- 
tain general statements might be deduced from the rou- 
tine psychology of human suggestion, attention, and so on. 
But really satisfactory conclusions will be possible only 
if the specific problems of the advertiser determine the ex- 
perimental study. 

We may well foresee that a large advertisement will 



430 PSYCHOLOGY 

draw the attention better than a small one, that a vivid 
and intensely colored poster will attract it more than a 
dull one, that an often repeated announcement will force 
itself on memory better than a single one, that a picture 
with dramatic interest will have more suggestive power 
than mere text. Yet, as soon as the business man has to 
consider whether he will have a full-page advertisement 
once, rather than a quarter-page advertisement four times 
in the same paper, or perhaps in four different papers, 
such general conclusions cannot help him. He needs defi- 
nite advice, which only the psychologist can furnish him. 
Psychologists found, for instance, that when fifty persons 
in ten minutes looked over a book of a hundred pages of 
advertisements, and were asked to write down what they 
remembered, every full-page advertisement was mentioned 
on an average of six and one-half times; every half-page 
less than three times; every quarter-page about one time, 
and the still smaller advertisements only about one-seventh 
of a time. The memory value of the quarter-page thus 
appears much smaller than one-quarter that of the full- 
page advertisement, and that of the one-eighth page again 
much smaller than one-half the value of the quarter-page. 
The customer who pays for one-eighth of a page receives 
not the eighth part, but hardly the twentieth part of the 
psychical influence which is produced by a full page. 

On the other hand, when the books were prepared in 
such a way that full-page advertisements occurred only 
once, half-page advertisements twice, quarter-page ad- 
vertisements four times, eighth-page eight times and each 
of the twelfth-page size twelve times, and every page was 
looked at for twenty seconds, it was found that the four 
times repeated fourth-page advertisement has a ly^ times 
stronger memory value than one offering of a full page or 
the twice repeated half page. But the eight times repeated 
eighth of a page is somewhat weaker than the four times 
repeated quarter page. Here nothing depends upon the 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOOY 431 

special figures, which refer in part to special conditions. 
The essential point is the possibility of applying exact 
experimental methods by which the relative mental in- 
fluence of various advertisements can be measured as well 
as the relative physical power of two electric lights. Ex- 
periments demonstrate that the right side of the page has 
more influence than the left, the upper more than the 
lower half, the outside more than the inside. The adver- 
tiser who pays for the right upper quarter as much as for 
the left lower quarter of the right page receives more than 
double the mental value. 

The advertisements which are mixed with reading mat- 
ter on the same page have a much weaker influence on the 
memory than those which are on pages exclusively devoted 
to advertising. The different attitudes which the mind 
takes toward text and toward advertisement interfere 
with each other, and do not allow to either the greatest 
mental effectiveness. The importance of borders, contrast 
effects, drawings, can be easily discriminated through such 
studies, and from these formal conditions the exact inquiry 
can well proceed to the more complex and internal qual- 
ities of the means of propaganda. The effect of novelty 
or of the comic, of suggested activity and of appeals to 
instincts and emotions, or rhyme and rhythm, can be 
traced. When experiments were carried on with adver- 
tising matter in which cuts and reading always filled an 
equal space and the subjects later had to recognize twenty- 
five such advertisements among ninety, in which sometimes 
the text, sometimes the cuts were changed, the results were 
as follows: The change in the cut was most frequently 
detected, but the cards with changed cuts are remembered 
by the text more often than the cards with changed text 
are remembered by the cut. The cut has, accordingly, 
greater attention value, but the text has higher memory 
value. 

The psychologist can even grade the suggestive values of 



432 PSYCHOLOGY 

the various means of appeal. But experiments of this kind 
at once introduce the reference to different groups, dif- 
ferent sex, different layers of society. "When a large num- 
ber of advertisements with typical appeals to different 
interests and emotions were grouped in the order of their 
relative persuasiveness, the appeal to the desire for saving 
of time for the women took the lowest place, but for the 
men the 10th from the lowest place among thirty. The 
appeal to appetite stood as high as the 8th place for the 
women, but only in the 3rd place for the men. The great- 
est difference was in the appeal to sympathy, which took 
the 23rd place for women and only the 7th for men. The 
next great difference was the warning against substitutes, 
which reached the 28th position with men and only the 
14th with women. Appeals to clan feeling, to social 
superiority, to the preference for the imported, to the 
desire for personal beauty and to the belief in recommenda- 
tions from famous persons stood in the highest part of 
the list for both sexes. 

The advertisement presents the simplest form of the 
commercial problem. We have a more complex group of 
mental functions involved in the case of the actual display 
in a shop window, a store or an exhibition. The details 
of color and form, of size and quantity, lead to questions 
which must be settled by new experiments, very different 
from those referring to advertisements. Even the appeal 
to the desire to save money or energy, to satisfy the per- 
sonal or the social vanity, must here take a very different 
turn, as the real, plastic object has a characteristically 
different effect on the mind. The effect of movements, 
with their suggestive power over the impulse to imitate, 
must be studied. An especially interesting task is to find 
the limits within which the object displayed may be beau- 
tiful and yet serve as a starting point for the will to act ; 
beauty in itself means inhibition of the practical impulse. 
Only through the psychological experiment can we deter- 



ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY 433 

mine in wliat combination some objects in a window will 
give the impression of the greatest number, or what back- 
ground will make them appear more impressive or more 
dainty. These questions of display lead to those of labels 
and packings, and finally of the entire outer appearance 
of the marketable wares. 

At the next step we find not the advertisetnent and not 
the objects to be sold only, but the salesman himself. He 
too has to turn the attention of the customer to different 
points, to awaken a vivid, favorable impression, to empha- 
size advantages, to influence the will decision, either by 
convincing arguments or by persuasion and suggestion. In 
either case the point is to strengthen the impulse to buy 
and to suppress the opposing ideas. Yet everyone of these 
factors, when it starts from a man and not from a thing, 
changes its form. The influence is directed toward a 
smaller number of persons and thus gains the possibility 
of individualization. Above all, the personal agent has the 
possibility of developing the whole process through a series 
of stages so that the attention slowly becomes focused on 
one definite point. Every partial function of the sales- 
man can be the starting point for experiments, and only 
through such a methodological study can the haphazard 
proceedings of the commercial world be transformed into 
really economic schemes. 

So far the enormous social interplay of energies which 
are discharged in the selling and buying of the millions 
becomes rather planless as soon as salesman and customer 
come in contact. The economic processes are carried out 
with superfluous and interfering associations and reactions 
which involve a tremendous waste of energy. The single 
individual can never find the ideal form by mere instinct. 
A systematic investigation is needed to determine the way 
to the greatest saving of mental energy and the result 
ought to be made a binding rule for every apprentice. 
The psychological interest, finally, leads from the indi- 



434 PSYCHOLOGY 

vidual seller to the organization of the whole business 
enterprise. The commercial administrator will need the 
results of psychological tests as much as the manufac- 
turer in order to find the best man for every vacant place. 
The personal equation, the particular abilities, the indi- 
vidual shades of memory and attention and imagination 
and will, must be known in order to foresee whether this 
man or this woman will be most successful for this par- 
ticular demand. Even for the highest positions man and 
work must be adjusted to each other. Ten college grad- 
uates led by haphazard methods into ten higher business 
positions may be inefficient and unsuccessful. If each of 
the positions had been analyzed into its psychological com- 
ponents, and each of the ten men had been studied by 
experimental psychological tests, it might have been pos- 
sible to place every one where he would have been a marked 
success. 



CHAPTER XXXII 

MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 

The Practical Standpoint. — The study of the disturb- 
ances of health stands in so many relations to psychology 
that we must, first of all, exclude everything which does 
not really belong to the psychotechnical tasks. The psy- 
chotechnical interest is confined in medicine as in every 
other sphere to the problems of practical service. Hence 
we are not concerned with the help which psychology 
offers for the theoretical understanding of mental diseases, 
unless such an explanation aids the diagnosis or prog- 
nosis or therapy. On the other hand, the observation of 
pathological disturbances has become in our time most 
helpful for the understanding of the normal mental life. 
The studies of the clinic have been starting points for 
promising psychological research. Thus we have a sig- 
nificant mutual stimulation, and perhaps the largest part 
of the psychomedical discussions of our day are controlled 
by these theoretical aspects. We abstract from all these, 
and ask only in what way psychology can serve the prac- 
tical physician. 

This limitation of our task makes us at the same time 
free from academic quarrels on disputed theoretical prob- 
lems. One such debatable claim threatens above all to 
disturb the circles of the medical theorists and to deprive 
psychology of its best usefulness. It is the problem of 
the subconscious. We have steadily eliminated the idea of 
subconscious mental states and have explained the reasons 
why we must deny it on principle, if consistent psycho- 

435 



436 PSYCHOLOGY 

logical explanation is sought. We recognized physiological 
brain processes as the agencies through which the effects 
in consciousness must be explained. A large party of 
physicians take the opposite stand. They find that mental 
diseases like hysteria or psychasthenia with all their com- 
plex mental symptoms must sometimes be explained as re- 
sults of earlier emotional experiences. It seems to them 
the most natural way to describe the process as a 
subconscious engagement of the mind with those earlier 
excitements which have long disappeared from con- 
sciousness. 

The theorist would have no difficulty in reducing such 
cases also to a purely physiological explanation. Yet he 
would readily acknowledge that it is much simpler to 
refer to these mental fears and anxieties and passions of 
the past in the terms of mental life than in the language 
of brain anatomy and physiology. The decisive point for 
us, however, is that this whole difference of interpreta- 
tion has not the slightest bearing on the practical use- 
fulness of the psychological insight. If we link the pres- 
ent hysteric attack with a forgotten love excitement in 
the girrs youth, it cannot make any difference whether we 
fancy that the after-effect of that shock of passion has 
lingered in the neurons of the brain or at the bottom of a 
subconscious mind. Both the diagnosis and the therapy 
remain exactly the same. 

If our treatment consists in bringing those ghosts of the 
past to the consciousness of the patient, it is indifferent 
whether we think that we liberate a suppressed subcon- 
scious emotion of the mind or whether we recognize that 
we reawake certain nervous processes. Also when the 
psychotherapist works by suggestion, he may imagine that 
he is appealing to the subconscious mind, where the con- 
sistent theorist would prefer to say that he is arousing 
certain brain processes. But however important such a 
difference may be for theory's sake, the treatment itself 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 437 

is the same. We may accordingly disregard the whole 
dispute over the subconscious. 

Diagnosis of Physical Disturbances. — The first prac- 
tical aim of the physician is to recognize the character 
of a disease. The right diagnosis must precede any prog- 
nosis and any therapy. Psychological knowledge may be- 
come serviceable for two ends: the physician may use 
psychological methods to diagnose both physical and psy- 
chical disturbances. To be sure, the contrast between men- 
tal and physical disturbances does not mean that a mental 
disease like hysteria can be conceived without illness of 
the physical body. Every mental disease is ultimately a 
disease of the brain. But the diagnostic interest may be 
concentrated on the mental side. When, the physician uses 
psychological methods in testing diseased intelligence, his 
aim is the diagnosis of a psychical disturbance and not 
of a pathological brain process. 

The examination of physical diseases hy psychological 
methods is needed always when the physician is dependent 
upon the subjective testimony of the patient. He may 
observe disturbances of the motor nerves from without, 
but when the sensory system is diseased, the expression 
of psychical experience becomes essential. The oculist who 
diagnoses astigmatism or various inefficiencies of the retina, 
defects of color seeing, limitations of the visual field, de- 
creased acuity of seeing, double images or wrong projec- 
tions must examine visual experiences of the patient. 
When the ear is diseased, the physician studies the limits 
of tone sensations or the gaps in the tone series or tJie 
acuity of hearing. Still more important for the diagnosis 
of physical disturbances are the sensations from the skin. 
Nervous disturbances in the sphere of the peripheral 
nerves, of the spinal cord and of the brain centers may 
be examined by tactual stimuli. The physician may recog- 
nize a diseased condition of the spinal cord by studying 
whether the tactual impression and the pain impression 



438 PSYCHOLOGY 

caused by a pin prick reach consciousness at the same time 
or one after the other. 

But even when the motor system is involved, the diag- 
nosis deniands a reference to the mental impulses. The pa- 
tient must give an account of his will intentions, if the 
lack of coordination or involuntary movements character- 
istic of diseases of the brain or of the spinal cord are 
clearly to be recognized. This leads to the disturbances 
of speaking, reading, writing or singing, which point to 
localized lesions in the central nervous system. The physi- 
cian must find out whether the patient is still able to 
repeat words which he hears, whether he can still read 
aloud and understand words spoken to him, whether he 
'can read something written, whether his voluntary speech 
has suffered, and many other possible variations of aphasia. 
By such psychological observations the neurologist recog- 
nizes whether the disturbance is in the motor or in the 
sensory centers of the hemispheres or whether lower nerve 
paths are diseased. 

Diagnosis of Mental Disturbances. — When the diag- 
nosis does not refer to the lesions of the nervous system, 
but to the mental states themselves, the methods of ex- 
perimental psychology stand in the foreground. Yet their 
application is frequently limited by the inability of the 
patient to adjust himself to the subtle conditions of the 
experiment or even to understand its requirements. The 
cruder methods of mere conversation with the patient or 
of observation of his behavior must then be substituted. 
Every single mental function may become important for 
the diagnosis. The first step may be the testing of the 
ability to apperceive the outer world. Disturbance of this 
function can reach any degree, from a slight confusion and 
superficial mental numbness to a complete psychical de- 
struction in the demented state. A typical method used 
in the psychiatric clinics is based on a series of pictures 
in which the same object, a church or a windmill or a 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 439 

cannon, is drawn with more and more details. The first 
drawing gives merely a slight suggestion, the last of the 
series the completed picture. The question is at which 
stage of this outline drawing the patient will apprehend 
the "meaning of the lines. In other methods the physician 
makes use of the tachistoscope to examine how many words 
can be correctly recognized when they are offered in a 
quick rhythm. Or, sentences are read in order to examine 
the breadth and depth of apprehension. The weakened 
ability must always be compared with standardized average 
functions. 

The laboratory methods are even more useful for exami- 
nation of the association process. If words are spoken to 
which the patient has to respond as quickly as possible 
with some other words, very characteristic delays of the 
process can be noticed. Deep inhibitory changes can thus 
be traced in exact detail. But it is no less important to 
study the qualitative character of the associations. Cer- 
tain diseases are characterized by the preference for exter- 
nal associations, mere similarities of sound or habitual 
word connections. In other forms of illness egocentric 
responses in which the patient associates everything with 
his own personality are diagnostically important. A 
standard list of a hundred words tried with a hundred 
normal persons may be used for comparison in order to 
discover quickly abnormal variations in the percentage 
of the different classes of associations. In certain dis- 
turbances it may be decisive that the patient is not able 
to perform the task. The words called to him remain in 
consciousness and do not produce reactions, or words are 
spoken which have no relation at all to the given words. 

This leads to the diagnostically most important exami- 
nation of memory. It is not enough to know whether the 
memory in general is still good or has suffered, and whether 
the defects refer to recent or to older experiences. The 
exact diagnosis demands all the psychotechnical details 



440 PSYCHOLOGY 

which the development of the memory studies in the psy- 
chological laboratory can furnish. The ability to retain 
must be distinguished from that to recall, the mechanical 
memory from the logical, the optical from the acoustical, 
the memory for words from that for colors or for persons, 
the quantity of the reproduced material from the exacti- 
tude of the reproduction, the recognition from the free 
reproduction, the immediate from the postponed rendering 
and so on. But not every ordinary method of the labora- 
tory can be carried into the clinics. While the psycholo- 
gist prefers to study the laws of memory by learning 
meaningless syllables, the memory studies in the hospital 
must be based on words or pictures as the syllables may 
not sufficiently hold the attention. The physician knows 
that in dementia senilis the patients can render the con- 
tent of sentences correctly but are unable to keep the 
exact order of the words in their minds. Moreover they 
add new ideas to the original material. In dementia para- 
lytica the newly acquired material for reproduction dis- 
appears with abnormal rapidity. The repetition therefore 
brings small improvement and words are mixed in which 
stand in no relation to the reproduced series. 

The pathological variations of the attention may be 
traced by demanding simple reactions on certain stimuli. 
The patient is asked to mark as quickly as possible all 
the letters r on a printed page or to make a hand move- 
ment whenever a certain word occurs in a story which is 
read to him. Other experiments indicate how many let- 
ters or words can be grasped by one act of attention when 
they are shown for a definite fraction of a second or how 
many details in a picture are recognized. A significant 
form of attention study refers to the influence of arti- 
ficial distractions. Especially the diagnosis of paralysis 
demands an exact testing of attention. From here we 
may turn to the examination of intelligence. We spoke of 
tests for this function when we reviewed the application 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 441 

of psychology to education. The physician usually pre- 
fers methods like the following. Three words are given 
and the patient has to form sentences in which these words 
occur, or sentences are shown in which some letters or 
syllables are lacking and the patient fills in the blanks, or 
two objects are mentioned and he has to define the differ- 
ence, or he has to explain the meaning of a proverb, or in 
a series of statements he has to separate the reasonable 
ones from the absurd ones. 

In studying the will activities the simplest tests on 
defective minds refer to the rapidity, exactitude and 
energy of movements. They register rapid rhythmical 
movements, measure the time for the quickest possible 
sorting of cards, the exactitude with which the patient can 
grasp for an object with closed eyes or with which he 
can throw a ball into a hole. Subtler investigations re- 
quire the ergograph through which a graphic record of 
a continuous series of hand movements can be made. In 
the case of the melancholic patient, for instance, the orig- 
inal strong movement becomes after a few repetitions very 
weak but then remains constant for a long while. On 
the other hand, in the case of the katatonie patient, only 
a small number of contractions can be performed, though 
those few remain equally strong. In other forms of ex- 
periments the details of speech movements and writing 
movements are analyzed. The rapidity and exactitude of 
eye movements too are of high diagnostic value. The. de- 
creasing ability of the eyes to follow a swinging pendulum 
may indicate dementia precox. Changes in the rapidity of 
reaction may be symptomatic of the maniac depressive 
states. 

The experimental methods which we have discussed refer 
only to actual processes in the consciousness of the pa- 
tient, but the experimental schemes of the laboratory may 
be helpful also when the aim of the diagnosis is to find 
non-conscious after-effects of earlier emotional experiences. 



442 PSYCHOLOGY 

This is claimed to be essential for many neurasthenic and 
psychasthenic forms of illness for which anxiety feelings 
and abnormal inhibitions, such as the fear to pass an 
open place or to handle a knife or to be in a crowd, are 
characteristic. Association experiments may throw most 
direct light on these non-conscious mental derangements. 
As soon as a word touches on the suppressed memories, 
the association time becomes longer and by the use of the 
galvanometric method the emotional effects of touching 
the sore spot may be revealed. Yet this situation is sharply 
to be separated from that which we discussed in relation 
to legal psychology. There these methods were used to 
unveil the ideas which the criminal hides intentionally. 
Here they are in use to bring to light memory ideas which 
are entirely outside of the knowledge of the patient and 
which his own efforts cannot reach. 

Another psychological method frequently used for this 
purpose consists in asking the subject to allow his imagi- 
nation to wander and then, often for hours, to speak 
everything which happens to come to his head. Absurd 
fragments of sentences, nonsensical ideas, may appear at 
the surface, but the physician may slowly recognize in 
them the effects of certain suppressed emotions and mem- 
ories, and he may be able to trace this material back to 
definite sources which were responsible for the disease. A 
similar aid to the diagnosis is expected by many from 
the analysis of the dreams of the patients, which are then 
interpreted as involuntary realizations of the suppressed 
emotional desires. This last group of diagnostic methods, 
especially the association schemes and the dream interpre- 
tation for the finding of suppressed memories, is usually 
called psychoanalysis. Its value is still much in doubt, 
while all those other psychological methods with which 
the physician examines the nervous or psychical disturb- 
ances are no longer objects of debate. They have become 
the indispensable schemes of scientific diagnosis. 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 443 

The Effect of Drugs. — From the recognition of the 
disease we turn to its treatment. One group of studies 
may be considered as introductory. Psychological experi- 
ments may serve to determine exactly the effects of dif- 
ferent therapeutic agencies, especially of chemicals like 
the bromides, the opiates, quinine, ether, caffeine, and 
many other substances which play a role in the scientific 
treatment of diseases. Their effects on the memory, atten- 
tion, volition and emotion of normal men must be studied 
in order to foresee the influences which they may exert 
on the patient. If the epileptic is treated with bromides, 
the psychological experiment can disclose how far it is 
true that bromide has influence on the memory func- 
tions. 

With the same type of experiments the physician may 
trace in many cases the actual effects of his curative efforts. 
Mentally retarded children may be treated for their 
anemia or astigmatism or deafness of adenoids, and subtle 
experimental tests of their attention, memory, feeling and 
thought may demonstrate whether the treatment has really 
removed the cause of the defectiveness or whether an in- 
born mental deficiency was responsible for the retarda- 
tion. Even the influence of baths, rest, electric treatment, 
change of climate and many similar therapeutic influences 
can be followed up by examining with exact experimental 
means the changes in the mental functions. The inhibi- 
tion of thought, the uncertainty of action, the excitability, 
the dullness of apprehension, ought not to be measured 
only by the general impressions of the physician or by 
the vague selfobservation of the patient. Both may be 
illusory and unreliable. 

Psychotherapy. — The center of therapeutic psycho- 
technics lies, of course, where mental processes themselves 
are employed to overcome the disturbances. Here we have 
true psychotherapy. For it the experimental methods of 
the laboratory are of small importance, but the general 



444 PSYCHOLOGY 

psychological ideas concerning attention, association, set- 
ting of will and of emotion must lead the psychotherapist 
at every step. A great variety of methods is at his dis- 
posal. Their common field of work is the wide border- 
land between health and mental disease, while the mental 
diseases in the narrower sense of the word are inaccessible 
to the psychotherapeutic influence. In that borderland, 
on the other hand, in which neurasthenic, psychasthenic 
and hysteric states are especially important, the psycho- 
therapeutic methods are indispensable. To be sure, they 
allow still less rigid rules than other schemes of therapy. 
Everything must be individualized. Here so much de- 
pends upon the personality of the physician that most 
neurologists have preference for one or another method 
with which they succeed best. This may easily take a 
negative form. One physician may exclude the typical 
hypnosis from his nervous clinic, another may distrust 
methods of mere explanation or persuasion, one may con- 
sider the psychoanalytic methods a grave mistake, another 
may not believe in autosuggestion or in reeducation; but 
no nerve physician can entirely disregard the efforts to 
overcome psychical disturbances by psychical means. 

The method which stands nearest to ordinary conversa- 
tion is that of influencing the patient hy reasonable expla- 
nation. To dispute by argument with a paranoiac and to 
try to convince the insane would be without any success; 
but it is entirely different with the mental states of the 
psychasthenic who is disturbed by unfounded anxieties or 
by irritating obsessions. The physician explains to him 
how it all came up, how his symptoms resulted merely 
from autosuggestion or are after-effects of emotional dis- 
turbances. That opens a new aspect to the patient and 
the deeper insight into his suffering may have an inhibi- 
tory influence on the mental intrusion. Yet such argu- 
ing can hardly exclude an element of suggestion. Then 
the influence takes the form of persuasion. But the per- 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 445 

suasive idea is not to influence the mind only by its own 
meaning and its associations, but by the manner of its 
presentation, by its impressiveness, by the authority, by 
the warmth of the voice, by the sympathy which stands 
behind it, by the attractiveness with which it is offered. 
This persuasion depends on personal powers to secure con- 
viction where the argument itself might be insufficient to 
overcome the contradictions. 

Very similar is the psychotherapeutic effect of a for- 
mal assurance. The psychotherapist assures the patient 
that he will sleep the next night or that he will be able 
to walk, with such firmness that the counter-idea is under- 
mined. Another excellent way to overpower a trouble- 
some idea or impulse or emotion is to r e'en force the oppo- 
site idea by breaking open the paths for its motor ex- 
pression. The effort to hold the antagonistic idea before 
consciousness may be unsuccessful so long as it is without 
motor effect. But if the action has been repeatedly gone 
through, the idea will develop more easily, and it becomes 
vivid in proportion to the openness of the channels of 
motor discharge. 

This holds true even of emotional states. A certain 
word, perhaps picked up by the psychasthenic in a par- 
ticular experience, may produce a shock or a depressing 
effect whenever it is heard. If we ask the patient arti- 
ficially to go through the movements which express joy 
and hilarity and speak the dreaded word at the height of 
the movements, a new feeling combination clusters about 
the sound and may overcome the antagonism. Or the 
physician may choose the form of a sharp order which 
breaks down the resistance just by its suddenness and 
loudness, perhaps supported by a quick arm movement 
which gives the cue for the inhibitive reflexes. Often it is 
wise to give the suggestion not from without but to pre- 
scribe it in the form of autosuggestions. The patient is 
to speak to himself in an audible voice every morning and 



446 PSYCHOLOGY 

every evening, saying that lie will now overcome a cer- 
tain fixed idea or that he will now produce a certain in- 
hibited impulse. Sometimes it is essential to give the 
suggestion with avoidance of any emphasis, only as a hint, 
as if the suggestion almost slipped from the tongue of the 
doctor. 

We have presupposed so far that the mind in which 
the suggestion works remains in its natural state. Under 
this condition the effect is very unequal with different 
personalities. To strengthen if, it is important to heighten 
the suggestibility. It must be acknowledged that these 
methods of emphasis and order, of assurance and make- 
believe, of persuasion and even of reasoning probably al- 
ways gain a certain part of their success by the increased 
suggestibility which the whole situation carries with it. 
The psychophysical readiness for suggestions grows, in- 
deed, with the expectation of the unknown and of the 
halfway mysterious and with the confidence in the doctor. 
Yet skillful artificial means can still surpass the effect of 
these natural conditions. If the physician's hand rests 
quietly on the forehead of the patient, who lies with 
closed eyes, he may secure a nervous repose and submis- 
sion which gives to the suggestions the most fertile soil. 

Again a psychologically different effect results from mild 
stroking movements. The slow changes of the tactual 
sensations evidently produce a rather strong influence on 
the equilibrium of nervous impulses, and vasomotor re- 
flexes seem to arise easily. A certain monotony of speak- 
ing may add to the suggestibility. Another most fruit- 
ful source of this change is any emotional state of mind 
in which the individual feels himself in contact with some- 
thing higher or stronger. The patient who can touch the 
relics of the saints or bathe in the water of Lourdes is 
led up to a state of suggestibility which makes suggestions 
readily effective. The objective religious value has nothing 
to do with it, as exactly the same effect may result from 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 447 

barbarous superstition. The amulets of a gypsy may se- 
cure the same resetting of the psychophysical system which 
the most sacred symbols awaken, and even many an edu- 
cated person feels unable to cross the threshold of a palmist 
or astrologist or to attend a performance of a spiritist 
without feeling an uncanny mental state which is objec- 
tively characterized by an increase of suggestibility. 

If this increase of suggestibility is carried to an ex- 
treme, we call it hypnotism. Yet the effectiveness of the 
suggestions is not necessarily greater in such an unnat- 
ural state. Sometimes well-applied suggestions work on 
wide-awake persons with increased suggestibility more 
strongly than on hypnotized subjects. But in general 
the stronger hypnoid states are especially favorable for the 
removal of obsessions and phobias and for the reenforce- 
ment of desirable impulses and emotions. The best method 
of hypnotizing is the one which relies essentially on the 
spoken word awakening through speech the idea of the 
approach of sleep. Only a small part of the therapeutic 
usefulness is secured during the hypnotic state itself. A 
pain may be removed, an idea inhibited, a movement se- 
cured, in cases where non-hypnotic suggestions would have 
found too great obstacles. 

During the hypnosis the physician may also open the 
storehouse of the patient's memory and bring to light the 
ideas which disturbed his equilibrium. In the most com- 
plex hysteric cases of dissociated personality new memory 
connections may be formed during the hypnotic state by 
which a synthesis of the double or triple personalities 
into the old one may be secured. Yet the best effect which 
the physician may hope for from hypnotic treatment is the 
posthypnotic one. Not Avhat happens during the sleep, but 
what the suggestion will produce afterward is essential. 
The fixed idea is to disappear forever, the apparently 
paralyzed limb is to be under control, the desire for mor- 
phine and cocaine is never to return. To be sure, the 



448 PSYCHOLOGY 

treatment often must be a prolonged one, if a perverse 
longing is really to be eliminated. 

Finally we may refer to the removal of the after-effects 
of emotional excitements. We have spoken of the psycho- 
analytic method of diagnosis by which suppressed emotions 
are discovered. The theory claims that these emotions 
became disastrous to the individual and caused hysteric 
disturbances and psychasthenic obsessions because they had 
no chance at the time of their first arising to be discharged 
in the normal way. It has been found that these patho- 
logical symptoms often disappear as soon as those detached 
emotions are brought to consciousness again and the nor- 
mal discharge can set in. The twisting of the psycho- 
physical connections is then straightened out again. The 
psychotherapeutic effort of the physician is accordingly 
directed toward finding the original source of the shock 
and bringing it to clear waking consciousness. It is need- 
less to say that the use of any one of these psychothera- 
peutic methods, notably of any hypnotic method, must ab- 
solutely be confined to the well-trained, scientific physician. 
He alone should employ hypnotism, just as he alone uses 
the morphine syringe. To produce hypnotic states for 
experiment's sake is most inadvisable, as it is surrounded 
with dangers even if we abstract from the moral issues. 
To play with hypnotism as a parlor trick is a crime. 

Prevention of Disease. — The discussion of criminal 
psychology led us naturally to the problem of the preven- 
tion of crime. The discussion of medical psychology must 
close with the problem of the prevention of disease. The 
first thought of the criminologist turns hopefully to the 
new endeavors of eugenics. We emphasized that the crim- 
inals are recruited from the mentally inferior and that 
society can reduce their army by suppressing the mar- 
riage of the mentally defective. The first thought of the 
physician moves along parallel lines. He finds the mental 
disturbances and mental weaknesses to an alarming degree 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 449 

the product of inheritance and he cannot help feeling that 
an effort to reduce the hereditary deficiencies is one of 
the sacred causes of mankind. 

Until only recently such a task seemed vague and beyond 
the powers of the scientist, as the hereditary connections 
appeared capricious and utterly outside of exact calcula- 
tion. But in our day the science of heredity has grown 
into one of the most exact parts of natural science with 
mathematical biometric laws based at first on botanical, 
later on zoological statistical observations and nowadays 
demonstrated by much human statistical material. The 
point which is essential for us is that deficiency of psy- 
chical powers is one of those human traits for which the 
conditions of inheritance can be measured scientifically. 
If the mental health of the parents and grandparents of a 
man and a woman are known, it may be foreseen what 
percentage of their children will be mentally normal or 
abnormal. The eugenic efforts must therefore find sym- 
pathy among the medical psychologists, provided that they 
are kept within narrow limits. These limits are certainly 
overstepped when not a real mental deficiency but only 
a neurasthenic or psychasthenic disturbance is taken as 
cause for social interference. Moreover, there is always 
a danger of substituting physical standards for mental 
ones and of forgetting that the physical cripple may be a 
highly valuable member of the social community. And, 
finally, the negative influences for the suppression of de- 
ficiency can too easily turn aside the social attention from 
the more important positive problem of bringing every 
germ of mental ability to highest development. It has 
rightly been claimed that the gain which a great thinker 
or any genius brings to society is, after all, greater than 
the loss which results from ten thousand inferior minds 
which perish after a useless life. 

Yet the care that defective minds shall not be bom is 
only preparatory for the chief social duty of preventing 



450 PSYCHOLOGY 

the development of psychical deficiency during lifetime- 
It is often asserted that our age with its restlessness and 
complexity of life is especially dangerous to mental health. 
It is very doubtful whether this is true. The impression 
that the number of mental disturbances is rapidly growing 
is certainly to a high degree the result of fuller medical 
knowledge by which much is recognized as disease which. 
In earlier years appeared only as a defect of character 
or of temperament or of intelligence within the limits of 
health. Many forms of mental disorder like the psychical 
epidemics of medieval times have disappeared. Moreover 
we have no right to forget that the extreme complexity 
of our modern life with its tremendous technical develop- 
ment has changed the rhythm of the events, but reduces to 
a high degree the demands on the individual mind. The 
technic makes the functions of the individual simpler and 
more comfortable. The amount of psychophysical energy- 
required for the needs of the day is decreased and not 
increased by railway and telephone and automobile and 
rotary printing press. The flickering light of the past 
must have irritated the nerves where gas or electric light 
makes seeing easy. 

Yet while the external conditions may be wrongly ac- 
cused of being sources of the widespread nervousness, it is 
perhaps more justifiable to say that our time is in many 
of its features tending more than the past toward an 
unsound inner attitude of man. Much of the present 
civilization leads the average man and woman to a super- 
ficiality and inner hastiness which undermine sound mental 
life more than the external factors. We eulogize the educa- 
tional principle of following the path of the true interest, 
and too often mean by that the path of least resistance. The 
child learns many useful things, but not the most impor- 
tant : to do his duty and to do it accurately and with sub- 
mission to an unselfish purpose. Hence the energy to 
concentrate on what is not interesting by its own appeal 



MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 451 

remains undeveloped. The result is an abundance of hasty 
jud^ients, of superficial emotions, of trivial problems, 
of sensational excitements, of vulgar pleasures, all of which 
result in a disorganization of the brain energies. A sound 
mind is a well-organized mind in which a controlling idea 
is able to inhibit the opposites and is in no danger of 
being overwhelmed by any chance intrusion. The dis- 
cipline and training of youth to concentrated attention 
and the checking of everything hysterical in social life 
are the essential demands, if mental deterioration is to be 
prevented. 

In its positive form the psychotechnical advice will help 
toward the development of sound social habits. The ten- 
dencies toward cleanliness, toward regular organization 
of the daily life, toward play and sport in the open air, 
toward frugality in the meals, toward temperance in the 
use of alcohol, coffee, tea and tobacco, toward discipline 
in sexual life, toward reasonable prudence in the face of 
danger, are mental attitudes and dispositions upon which 
the health of the community is dependent and which must 
be systematically fostered. It is a mistake to believe that 
such social efforts can be really successful, if they are left to 
common sense views: they must be based on careful psy- 
chotechnical calculations founded on a thorough insight 
into the mental mechanisms of the average man and 
woman. 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 

The Outlying Fields of Psychotechnics. — Psychotech- 
nical sciences are needed wherever mankind stands before 
purposes of civilization which are related to mental life. 
We have discussed four such purposes, the securing of 
education, justice, economic progress, and health. It is 
evident that they do not constitute the totality of aims 
toward which the social consciousness is directed. We con- 
fined our discussion to these four fundamental groups, 
because the psychotechnical work there has been relatively 
best developed. But it is evident that many other sig- 
nificant purposes of civilization suggest similar psycho- 
technical efforts. Politics and social reform, morality and 
religion, art and science depend upon mental functions as 
much as education, law, industry and medicine. More- 
over everyone of these great aims branches out in many 
directions. The economic progress might be served by psy- 
chotechnical aid to agriculture or to mining as well as to 
manufacture and commerce; and few branches of the 
economic life are more significant and more accessible to 
psychology than home economics and domestic activities 
of every kind. We may have a psychotechnics of navi- 
gation and of transportation, or to point in quite dif- 
ferent directions a psychotechnics of social intercourse and 
of sport, or again, a psychotechnics of war, with its 
abundance of problems. 

The whole social organism from the simplest intercourse 
of man with man to the most complex cooperation of man- 

452 



CULTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 453 

kind may profit from the systematic application of psy- 
chological methods and psychological laws. Every great 
social problem which agitates the public mind can be dis- 
cussed on its highest level only when the mental factors 
involved are not treated from the standpoint of a hasty 
and superficial popular psychology, but from that of scien- 
tific study. "Woman's suffrage and feministic movements, 
temperance and prohibition, capitalism and socialism can- 
not be really understood until the psychological differ- 
ences between men and women or the psychological effects 
of alcohol or the psychological conditions for human satis- 
faction from wealth are studied with impartial, scientific 
earnestness. And this demand is felt not only for the 
momentous questions but for a thousand little problems 
which interest the community. It is superficial to speak 
in favor of or against simplified spelling as long as the 
mental processes involved have not been thoroughly ana- 
lyzed. The trivial concerns of daily life with its caprices 
and fashions and the highest ideals of spiritual life with 
its strong appeals can both alike be furthered by psycho- 
technical principles. 

Even the inspiration of the church is in no conflict 
with a calculating study of the psychological effect which, 
for instance, the colors of the church windows must have 
on the emotional setting of the worshiper. The moral life 
does not suffer, if conscious efforts are made by suggestion 
and upbuilding of habits and removal of temptation to 
keep the weak one on the straight path. Of course it is 
true of the social and moral and political interests as well 
as of all the others which we have discussed that the 
psychologist can supply only the facts. He can say only 
that if a certain mental end is to be reached a certain 
means must be employed; but it is never the share of 
the psychologist to decide what ends ought to be chosen. 
"We must still trace the chief psychotechnical lines at least 
for two groups of purposes : the aims of art and science. 



454 PSYCHOLOGY 

Life Enjoyment. — From a philosophical point of view 
we must insist on a sharp demarcation line between beauty 
and pleasure, between the ideal aims of a drama or a 
symphony and the mere selfish aims of a pleasant meal. 
From a strictly psychological point of view, however, art 
and literature and music are not separated by any sharp 
boundary from many other endeavors to bring joy to 
the human heart and pleasure to the human senses. The 
psychotechnical work must be adjusted to the psycho- 
logical aspect. If we wish to use psychological knowledge 
for purposes of art and beauty, the outlook must be wid- 
ened so as to include the whole field of human enjoy- 
ments, the pleasures of life as well as the pleasures of 
art, the psychotechnics of the agreeable as well as the 
psychotechnics of the perfect. 

Thus we may begin to apply psychology to esthetic 
problems in the midst of the most trivial interests. The 
psychologists may well give advice to the florist who wants 
to increase the fragrance of his bunch of flowers by com- 
bining contrasting odors. His experimental studies on 
taste and temperature and smell and touch could con- 
tribute much information useful to the cook who is anxious 
to prepare savory dishes. He has not a little in store for 
the dressmaker who tries to produce pleasing effects by 
combinations of colors and forms and materials. But even 
this apparently insignificant part of psychotechnical in- 
terests can often be linked with problems of deep import. 
The question of the psychological conditions for enjoy- 
ment may be recognized as one of great social consequence, 
if we inquire by what attractions the workingman can 
be drawn away from the saloon. By what wholesome ap- 
peals to the desire for amusement can the masses be di- 
verted from the unhealthy influence of the motion pic- 
tures which too often make crime and vice seductive and 
create a hysteric attitude by their thrills and horrors? 

In this sphere of life enjoyment can also be found 



CULTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 455 

every possible form of play. The practical interest of the 
psychologist finds numberless problems in the games of 
the adult as well as in the play of the nursery. The 
strictly esthetic effort is to shape the play so that it gives 
the maximum of pleasure. The psychology of emotion, of 
imitation, of suggestion, of association of ideas, can con- 
tribute much to secure this effect. The toys and games of 
the child must be adapted to his youthful imagination, to 
his desire for make-believe, and to the shifting character 
of his attention. The ball games and the card games can 
be steadily improved by an insight into the mental de- 
mands. But this direct aiming toward pleasure is cer- 
tainly not the only psychological consideration. The psy- 
chologist cannot overlook the mental effects which the play 
and the game may have in the development and training 
of the young mind. Play is to him to a large degree a 
preparation for the functions of life. 

Again if the play is accepted as valuable, the psycholo- 
gist must ask how it can best be learned. We have inter- 
esting experimental studies on the methods of learning to 
play chess or ball. Finally, the game may suggest psy- 
chological problems accessible to experimental investiga- 
tions which have nothing to do directly with the pleasure 
derived from the game, but refer to the psychological con- 
ditions of effective play. The football players may be psy- 
chologically examined; their reaction time may be meas- 
ured in thousandths of a second in order to determine 
the individual differences and to study the changes in their 
rapidity of response under different conditions. Yet, after 
all, the psychological interest centers in the higher esthetic 
emotions. We must turn to the psychotechnics of art. 

The Fine Arts. — The esthetic part of experimental 
psychology seems especially predestined to be applied in 
practical life because no group of experimental investiga- 
tions in the psychological laboratory can be so immediately 
transformed into advice for the outside vv^orld. The ex- 



456 PSYCHOLOGY 

periments with feelings and emotions are usually far re- 
moved from our actual life interests. But when it comes 
to esthetic emotions the walls of the laboratory are no 
barrier. The reason for this difference is evident. All the 
practical emotions presuppose our belief in the reality of 
the objects. We cannot become really joyful or sad over 
something which we recognize as fictitious and introduced 
for experiment's sake. But the esthetic emotion has no 
reference to our practical demands. We do not enter into 
a personal relation with the characters of a novel or a 
drama; we are disinterested spectators of the life which 
is exhibited in art. The result is that the esthetic emo- 
tion can be created with all its richness in any corner of 
the laboratory. A Japanese print or a sonnet can arouse 
exactly the same feelings there which it would create in 
the museum or at the fireside. 

Yet while the conditions for the growth of esthetic psy- 
chology in the laboratory are favorable the development 
has been on the whole a slight one, and very few of the 
results have been brought into actual contact with art. 
The work started half a century ago with simple experi- 
ments in the choice of visual forms. The observers had 
to select among many rectangles those in which the rela- 
tion of the short side to the long appeared to them the 
most pleasant, or among many divided lines those in which 
the division seemed to them most pleasing. It is clear that 
the psychotechnical application needs no further argu- 
ment. If for instance it is found that a rectangle appears 
most pleasing when the relation of the ''golden section" 
prevails, that is, when the shorter side is related to the 
longer as the longer to the sum of both, the artist ought 
to prefer this proportion unless some special reasons sug- 
gest a deviation. We may at least trace some groups of 
problems which have been studied since those early days. 

In the field of visual arts much interest was given to 
the pleasantness and unpleasantness of isolated and com- 



CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 457 

bined colors. The pure color is always more agreeable 
than the slightly saturated, but some colors, especially 
green and violet, can reach the highest degree of pleasant- 
ness with the middle stage of saturation. On a dark 
background the order of pleasantness seems to be red, 
yellow, green, blue; on a light background, blue, red, 
green, yellow. In combinations the most pleasant effects 
come from colors which are slightly less different than the 
complementary colors. Colors of the red side of the 
spectrum enter more easily into pleasant combinations than 
those of the blue side. Yellow is most favorable; the 
golden frame for pictures therefore most advisable. Other 
investigations dealt with the apparent weight of the colors. 
In arts and crafts, in painting, in architecture, we de- 
mand stability and heaviness at one place, lightness and 
freedom at others. An experimental analysis of these asso- 
ciative elements in colors can aid the artist in his conscious 
selection. 

Yery important for the painting are the studies which 
refer to the associative element in our seeing of satura- 
tion. We are accustomed to keep in memory those colors 
of the well-known objects in our surroundings which they 
usually show under average light conditions. We believe, 
therefore, that we really perceive their color in full satura- 
tion, eyen when by lights or shadows the pure color char- 
acter has been lost. The result is that we demand from 
paintings a degree of saturation in the colored objects 
which greatly surpasses the actual colored lights in life. 
If the painter wants to produce a pure impression of 
reality, he must adjust himself to this psychological ten- 
dency of the spectator and must exaggerate the satura- 
tion. 

In the world of forms the elementary laboratory experi- 
ments have come nearest to actual problems of art in 
studies on repetition, on symmetry, on unity, and so on. 
The aim is here as in experimental work everywhere to 



458 PSYCHOLOGY 

abstract from the manifoldness of things and to reduce 
the situation to the simplest terms. When, for instance, 
the esthetics of repetition was studied in the laboratory, 
fifty movable white silk threads were stretched over black 
velvet parallel to one another so that any group of com- 
binations could be made. It was found that no real pleas- 
ure results when instead of one or two units three different 
units alternate, such as groups of two, three and five 
threads. If two groups alternate, the pleasure is the 
stronger, the greater the difference of interest. One is 
always perceived as the chief and the other as the sec- 
ondary group. In the chief group far-reaching variations 
may occur without interfering with the pleasure, but if the 
secondary group is not exactly repeated, the enjoyment 
quickly decreases. The magnitude of the units is more im- 
portant than their quality. The experiments with such 
simple threads in various group combinations admitted 
a large number of such deductions, and it was at the same 
time possible to demonstrate the actual realization of these 
principles in works of architecture, where windows and 
columns, statues and arches alternate. 

The investigation of symmetry can start from the evi- 
dent fact that a geometrical symmetry on the two sides 
of a vertical middle line is satisfactory. The question 
is how far this same pleasure in balance can be secured 
by geometrically unequal forms. If there is a short ver- 
tical line on the left side at a certain distance from the 
central line, how far from the middle line must a long 
vertical line on the right side be, or a double line, or a 
star, or a perspective drawing which suggests depth, or a 
colored object? What is their effect on our feeling of 
equilibrium, and where must they be placed in order to 
give the most satisfactory esthetic impression? The ex- 
periment shows that it makes a difference whether there is 
a frame around the whole field or not. If it is an un- 
limited field, the weight of the forms increases with the 



CIILTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 459 

distance from the center. The small line far out, accord- 
ingly, balances the long or heavy line near the center. It 
works like a mechanical principle of balance. But if a 
frame surrounds the whole, the psychological effect is 
different. The frame reflects the attention toward the 
center and everything appears the stronger and the more 
impressive, the nearer it is to the center. The short ver- 
tical line near the middle, then balances the long line 
near the frame. Hence the composition of an unlimited 
arabesque must be different from that of a framed paint- 
ing, and the artist can translate the experimental results 
into practical standards. 

Other groups of experiments do not point directly to 
the conditions of pleasure but rather to the technical fac- 
tors from which the work of art is built up. If the artist 
wishes to paint the glowing effect of the sinking sun, he 
may make use of the psychology of contrast effects and 
after-images and may paint little green zigzag lines in 
the purple disk. Or if he wishes to bring out the im- 
pressionistic, glittering effect of a sunlit summer land- 
scape, he may make use of the modern technic of small 
color spots placed side by side. But then the psychologist 
can aid him in determining the size the spots should be, 
if color fusion and mixture are to be avoided and the 
gleaming restlessness is to be suggested. Or the technical 
question may stand on a higher level. We know that an 
essential condition of esthetic enjoyment is the appre- 
hension of unity in the work of art. We may study experi- 
mentally what conditions favor the uniting of the impres- 
sions. It can be shown that if many circles occur in 
the field of vision, they are easily bound together by the 
imagination, triangular forms less easily, squares still less. 
Spots of the same color have this tendency toward unity 
still more than equal forms. Especially for arts and crafts 
such experimental results can be practically important. 

While researches of this kind deal with the works of 



460 PSYCHOLOGY 

art themselves, others refer to the mental states of the 
spectator. Both the individual differences and the gen- 
eral conditions of esthetic enjoyment may be analyzed. 
"What is the influence of different types of imagery, of 
difference in age, of different degrees of education on the 
appreciation of a picture? What is the effect of repeti- 
tion, of fatigue, or emotion? How are the esthetic im- 
pressions influenced by tea or coffee or alcohol? How are 
they dependent upon the position of the onlooker? The 
experiment shows that the same pictures may have charac- 
teristically different effects when they hang above or below 
or at the height of the spectator's eyes. How does the 
alternation of feelings influence the individual? Experi- 
ments have been carried on in which in a dark room beau- 
tiful landscape pictures and repulsive views of surgical 
operations alternated with increasing rapidity. As soon 
as a high speed is reached, the effects are different with 
different types of persons. With some the contrasting 
feelings inhibit each other, with some a new complex feel- 
ing arises from the change of the impressions, with some 
the one wins over the other and with some a mutual reen- 
forcement by contrast seems to result. 

Music and Poetry. — We have touched on a variety of 
esthetic experiments in the field of visual impressions. 
Their psychotechnical importance refers equally to paint- 
ing, sculpture, architecture and industrial arts. The prob- 
lems which link themselves with poetry and music could 
be grouped in a similar way. The psychologist proceeds 
here too from the esthetic elements, from the pleasure 
value of the tones and chords and of simple rhythms. An 
abundance of work has cleared this ground. The psychol- 
ogy of the melody, of the rhyme, of the formation of 
stanzas, of the associative factor in music, of the various 
musical instruments, of the dramatic interplay and con- 
trast, and of the stage setting is still little analyzed by 
experimental methods. 



CULTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 461 

To give an illustration of a more complex experimental 
research in the field of poetry, we may consider recent 
studies on the psychophysical effect of the speech elements 
in verse. For a large number of English poets exact 
statistics were gathered concerning the relative frequency 
of every vow^el and consonant sound in accented and un- 
accented syllables. It was found that every poet has his 
own characteristic percentage of frequency for the vari- 
ous speech elements. The most frequent sounds were then 
used for the formation of nonsense syllables and these 
were grouped as five-iambic lines. The subjects while 
reading these lines aloud registered their subjective reac- 
tions, their inner tensions and relaxations by rhythmical 
hand movements which were recorded on a revolving drum. 
It was found that the differences of the reactions to these 
nonsense syllables corresponded to the differences of the 
reaction movements to the real verses of the poets. The 
differences between the psychophysical responses to Byron 
and to Keats were similar to those between the responses 
to the meaningless letter groups, although the subjects did 
not know from what poet the most frequent letters had 
been drawn. 

It would be onesided, however, to demand that every 
psychotechnical prescription in the realm of beauty be 
drawn from experiment. Other analytic methods must 
supplement the laboratory work. Statistics may furnish 
the material. It has been found that the number of un- 
accented syllables that stand between accented ones in 
standard prose change with the various literary intentions. 
They are more frequent in narration than in dialogue. 
Or it has been observed that the monosyllabic words are 
much more frequent in the drama than in the novel, more 
numerous in an emotional than in an indifferent text. 
Similar studies are reported from the field of music. The 
time value of the accented and of the unaccented sylla- 
bles differ much more in the artificially composed songs 



462 PSYCHOLOGY 

than in the folk songs, and the pitch of the tones for the 
accented syllables is on the average higher than that for 
the unaccented. A writer or a composer may draw sug- 
gestions from such statistical inquiries. If the composer 
wants to produce by his melody a kind of folk song effect, 
he may give his attention to the distribution of time values 
in the various syllables. 

Of course, it would be an absurd misunderstanding, if 
the psychologist's advice were looked on as a substitute for 
true artistic inspiration. But every art needs many forms 
of technic. The sculptor must know how to carve the 
stone and the musician must have studied counterpoint. 
The mere knowledge of counterpoint is not sufficient for 
composing music. The psychotechnical prescription too 
can never replace the imagination and originality of the 
artist or poet. But an acquired knowledge of the psycho- 
technical rules can be an aid to him, which may become 
as subordinated to his creative energies as the mere tech- 
nic of color mixing is subservient to the intentions of the 
painter. 

The Work of the Scientist. — Our last word may be de- 
voted to the field of science and scholarship. But here 
we must be on the lookout. Certainly we can apply psy- 
chology in the interest of knowledge, inasmuch as we use 
psychological laws for the explanation of the historic 
events. But we have discussed fully the difference be- 
tween this kind of application and that of psychotechnics. 
We saw that the psychohistorical sciences which explain 
the political and religious, artistic and economic history 
of mankind by psychological laws are fully justified, but 
must be sharply separated from the psychotechnical efforts 
which never are turned backward but are directed toward 
practical results. Our question here can be only whether 
it is possible to make psychotechnical use of psychology in 
order to aid the practical work of securing scientific truth. 
If, for instance, a natural scientist makes an observation 



CULTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 463 

and the psychologist can show that under the given con- 
ditions certain sources of error are inevitable as they 
spring from the process of perceiving, the psychotechnical 
application is evident. The scientist is forced to give his 
attention to these psychotechnical conditions of perception. 
No doubt, the psychohistorical and the psychotechnical in- 
terests are often intertwined. Our last glance must fall on 
these strictly psychotechnical problems. 

We may begin with the natural sciences. The student 
of nature must know first what constant psychical factors 
influence his work, and he must furthermore know how 
far variations from individual to individual may be ex- 
pected. Certain overestimations or underestimations of 
space and time are characteristic of every consciousness. 
The effects of color contrast or of adaptation of vision 
or the rhythmical apperception of equal sounds and num- 
berless other conditions of perception may also be taken 
into account as constant factors. On the other hand the 
naturalist cannot predict in general how much a special 
astronomer will shift the optical impression of the pass- 
ing of the star in relation to a series of pendulum sounds. 
That depends upon individual differences which must be 
examined in the particular case so as to free the telescopic 
observation from mistakes. The complex traits of sug- 
gestibility, of memory, of training, of attention, must be 
determined among the individual differences. Moreover 
the same observer may come to very different results in 
the morning or in the evening, in a state of freshness 
or of fatigue, at the first or at the repeated observation, or 
under different climatic conditions. It is the aim of psy- 
chotechnics not to predict how the individual will behave, 
but to emphasize that this individual behavior must be 
examined if the results are to be trustworthy. 

The detailed psychological investigation must be ad- 
justed to the needs of the special science. We may point 
again to the psychotechnical interest in astronomy. It is 



464 PSYCHOLOGY 

well known how much astronomers disagreed on the deli- 
cate lines, the ''canals/' in the planet Mars of which up 
to four hundred have been drawn by some observers. A 
leading astronomer raised the question of how far we 
are really able to watch such faint lines under the given 
conditions of illumination and how far they are the prod- 
ucts of imagination and suggestion. He therefore started 
psychological experiments with thin artificial lines drawn 
on a translucent disk at ten meters distance from the 
observer. He examined how far blanks in the lines and 
interruptions could be noticed and how far additional lines 
were imagined when the artificial disk was seen at the 
angle at which Mars is observed in the telescope. It be- 
came evident that most of the apparent lines must be 
illusions. 

Another interesting psychological condition of astro- 
nomical research is the tendency to overestimate or under- 
estimate the differences of intensity. The astronomer is 
accustomed to estimate a star's magnitude by its relative 
place between two chief classes. A highly trained ability 
for this estimation is especially important for the study 
of stars which are of changing light intensity. The psy- 
chological analysis has shown that this ability of the astron- 
omers fluctuates. The beginner makes the steps too large, 
the well-trained observer tends to make them too small. 
But there are periods in which this sensitiveness steadily 
increases, and then suddenly falls below the average. A 
subtle psychological examination is needed to estimate the 
correctness of the individual judgment. Here we may 
also think of the reaction times, important for the time 
observation of the astronomer. Another much discussed 
astronomical phenomenon of psychological origin is the 
increase of size not only of sun and moon but also of the 
star distances near the horizon. 

The illusions of space and time estimation, the wrong 
judgments of movements, of angles, of color qualities and 



CULTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 465 

color intensities, of noises, of tastes and smells, of resist- 
ance and weight are important for the physicist and chem- 
ist. They must give fullest attention to the threshold for 
stimuli and their differences, to the limits of increase for 
sensations, to the effects of contrast, to the after-effects, 
to the phenomena of mixture and fusion, to the results 
of fatigue and of training. The psychologist knows that 
the same object may appear different in weight when it 
is hot or cold and that objects of equal weight may ap- 
pear heavy or light according to their size. The physicist 
must know such illusions, and while he can objectively 
eliminate them by his scales, there is no natural science 
which does not ultimately rely on the senses. The chemist 
too, in spite of all his technical devices, is dependent upon 
the sense impressions. He relies on his color and smell 
sensations, and frequently even on his temperature and 
tactual sensations. It would be psychotechnically very 
important to know the individual differences in the sen- 
sitiveness of the chemists when the perceptions of colors, 
light intensities, opaqueness, tastes and smells are re- 
ported. 

The psychophysiological influences on perception, judg- 
ment, attention and memory are still more important in 
the field of the descriptive sciences in which the exact 
measurement must often be replaced by simple impressions. 
The observations of the mineralogist and geologist, of the 
botanist, zoologist and anthropologist, of the physiologist 
and clinician, are frequently based on his personal im- 
pressions of forms and distance, of colors and brightness, 
of taste, smell and noise, of time intervals and numbers and 
especially of similarities. In everyone of these directions 
both constant conditions of illusion and error and indi- 
vidual variations and fluctuations must be psychologically 
considered. The explorer who estimates the height of a 
distant mountain must know what an extremely compli- 
cated psychical achievement is involved. 



466 PSYCHOLOGY 

A mental function the importance of which can hardly 
be overrated for the work of the scientist is his sugges- 
tibility. Every scholar is under the influence of sugges- 
tions in the form of prejudices or school doctrines. Our 
time has witnessed the belief of the French physicists in 
the N-rays, They were first observed in consequence of a 
chance optical illusion. No one outside of France could 
discover them, but through the influence of suggestion 
every later observer in France saw them, until their 
illusory character was recognized. The most fertile soil 
for suggestive influence is, of course, the so-called scien- 
tific studies of physical phenomena alleged to be of super- 
natural origin. The materializations of the spiritualistic 
mediums and similar trance phenomena would never have 
deceived the observers, if the uncanny conditions of the 
''seances" were not so favorable for an abnormal sug- 
gestibility. 

The different inclination of the observers to be im- 
pressed by likeness or by unlikeness also demands care- 
ful psychological testing with the help of the experiment. 
Some scientists are more impressed by similarities and 
others by differences. The natural scientist has to form 
judgments of this kind so frequently that his tendency 
ought to be measured by exact standards. Finally the 
experiments have shown that the ability for the forming 
of judgment, for estimating, and for describing can be in- 
creased by training. 

The Work of the Historian and of the Philologist. — The 
scholar who seeks truth in the field of civilization, the 
historian or the philologist, needs the psychotechnics of 
scholarship no less than the student of nature. We have 
excluded from the realm of psychotechnics the mere psy- 
chological explanation of historic events, but we surely 
must include the psychological analysis of the sources from 
which the historian draws his material. He must treat 
his authorities from the old chroniclers to the latest war 



CULTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 467 

correspondent as the lawyer treats the witnesses. He must 
study the psychological conditions of their perception and 
apperception, their attention and memory, their tempera- 
ment and character. The judgments of time intervals or 
dimensions, for instance in a battle, depend first upon 
illusions of perception which are common to all; but the 
frequent exaggerations are still more often the results of 
individual emotions. Hope or fear, enthusiasm or hos- 
tility, changes all figures. 

Moreover observations are always influenced by the ten- 
dency to shape the new in accordance with the accus- 
tomed; and expectation too falsifies the experience. 
Finally the reporting observer is a member of a multi- 
tude. He may be under the influence of crowd sugges- 
tion. Partisanship and indignation, national ambitions 
and national vanities, fashions of the day, may have dic- 
tated his story. The experiment shows that every emotion 
interferes with the attention. Mere surprise may have 
paralyzed the ability for objective observation. All the 
researches which have been carried on in the interest of 
legal psychology can be applied here for the analysis of 
the historic testimony. An interesting complex case is 
that of the autobiographies. The facts are likely to be 
distorted not by a mere fading away of memories with 
the passing of time, but characteristic fusions and substi- 
tutions, exaggerations and reductions, concentrations and 
eliminations, must arise from psychological causes. 

Here also we need the help of group psychology. The 
historian must know how the observations of women are 
likely to be different from those of men, how various 
vocational groups or professional classes are likely to create 
different reports. The medieval chronicle is different ac- 
cording to whether the scribe was young or old, a monk 
or a knight. But the mental types of the writers are no 
less significant. The historian must have a psychological 
understanding for the different intellectual types, for the 



468 PSYCHOLOGY 

objective and the subjective minds, the attentive and the 
superficial observers, the men with visual or with acous- 
tical imagery. The prevalence of one or another group of 
sensations can often be traced in historical descriptions. 

Even the historically important formation of rumors 
has been brought into the scheme of the psychological ex- 
periment. The results showed a typical process of re- 
moulding of the original material. The psychotechnical 
historical studies must also include the laboratory experi- 
ments on misreading, mishearing and miswriting. The 
historical sources are products of mental mechanisms which 
often create defective work. The author did not write 
what he intended to say, or the writers of the old manu- 
scripts did not understand correctly what was dictated 
to them. Even typists and typesetters make mistakes. 
Work in the psychological laboratories has made it clear 
that the overwhelming majority of these mistakes are not 
accidental, but are the results of associated ideas, especially 
ideas with strong emotional interest. The suppressed idea 
may discharge itself in action as soon as the similar idea 
occurs in consciousness. The mistakes throw light on the 
mind of the writer, but on the other hand the historian 
must reflect on the psychological conditions of the writer 
in order to eliminate his mistakes and to correct, for in- 
stance, the wrong names and dates in his story. 

This leads us to the value of psychology for the philolo- 
gist for whom the written text is the direct object of in- 
terest. Careful experiments have traced the conditions by 
which mistakes slip into the rewriting and copying of text. 
The influence of acoustical and optical anticipations and 
after-effects were determined. The experiments showed, 
moreover, that the copying of meaningless texts occasions 
entirely different mistakes from those which occur in the 
copying of a text which is understood. In the latter case, 
for instance, words are left out only when they have no 
significance for the meaning of the sentence. Hence it is 



CULTUEAL PSYCHOLOGY 469 

to a certain degree possible in comparing the various philo- 
logical manuscripts to determine whether the writer did 
or did not understand the text and this allows a judg- 
ment concerning the character and importance of the sub- 
stitutions and changes in the text. Another aspect of 
philological criticism is emphasized by the psychological 
studies on speech melody. It was possible to show that 
ever}^ individual author has a certain system of rising 
and falling movements in the intonation of his sentences. 
This and similar formal traits of style remain so constant 
with the special writer that as soon as his psychological 
tendency is recognized it becomes possible to discover 
what parts of an epic poem or of a prose book are spurious 
and are later interpolations. 

The Work of the Psychologist. — We may take our last 
step and ask whether even the work of the scholarly psy- 
chologist may not be aided by psychotechnical knowledge. 
We have seen that the science of causal psychology stands 
or falls with the possibility of selfobservation. Who- 
ever treats it simply as a science of external behavior does 
not need selfobservation, but he gives up the ideal of 
psychology and makes the so-called psychology a mere 
branch of physiology. For his work the psychotechnics 
of natural science would be sufficient. But those who 
acknowledge that the psj^chologist has to describe and to 
explain the experiences in so far as they exist for the indi- 
vidual as such, must seriously consider the character of 
selfohservation. The psychologist is himself a witness, 
and the analysis of his ability to be a witness is the more 
important as he has to give testimony about facts which 
no one but he himself can experience. The question must 
therefore arise how far he is predisposed to give a reliable 
account. 

The psychologist's mere will to observe may have too 
much disturbed the processes in his consciousness. His 
suggestibility may have made him believe that he experi- 



470 PSYCHOLOGY 

enced memory ideas or feelings which did not occur. He 
may have imagined he experienced certain feelings be- 
cause he expected their appearance. He may be unable to 
disentangle the complex experiences, because he lacks train- 
ing in the recognition of the elements. The results of 
selfobservation must be freed from psychical sources of 
illusions and mistakes, just as much as the observations 
of the astronomer. But that is indeed ultimately a psycho- 
technical interest. The investigator in the psychological 
laboratory must train himself systematically in the intro- 
spective methods and this training must be controlled by 
psychotechnical knowledge. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following short list of books in the English lan- 
guage is meant to help the student of psychology. Yet it 
must be emphasized that any thorough study of the field 
demands acquaintance also with the literature in foreign 
languages, especially in German. Moreover, not the least 
valuable part of the psychological literature, both in 
English and foreign languages, must be sought in the 
psychological magazines and archives. For the English 
reader, articles in the following periodicals are essential: 
Psychological Review, American Journal of Psychology, 
British Journal of Psychology, Journal of Educational 
Psychology, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Harvard 
Psychological Studies. For problems on the borderland 
between psychology and philosophy the following may be 
consulted : Mind, Philosophical Review, Journal of Philos- 
ophy and Psychology. A complete bibliography can be 
found in the yearly Psychological Index, which appears as 
a supplement to the Psychological Review. 

In the list given below each title appears once only in 
the place where it is most significant. Many of these 
books contain bibliographies for their particular subject, 
which show the way also to the foreign literature. 

History. 

Baldwin, J. Mark. History of Psychology (2 Vols.). 

N. Y., 1913. 
Brett, George S. A History of Psychology. London, 

1912. 

471 



472 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

Dessoir, Max. Outlines of the History of Psychology 

(Tr.). N. Y., 1912. 
Hall, G. Stanley. Founders of Modern Psychology. 

N. Y., 1912. 
Kand, Benjamin. The Classical Psychologists. Boston, 

1912. 
Villa, Guido. Contemporary Psychology. London, 1903. 

Chapters 2-5 and 21-26. 
Principles of Causal and Purposive Psychology. 

Bei^gson, Henri. Matter and Memory (Tr.). London, 

1911. 

— . Creative Evolution (Tr.). N. Y., 1911. 

Calkins, Mary W. A First Book in Psychology. N. Y., 

1910. 
. The Persistent Problems of Philosophy. N. Y., 

1912. 
Dunlap, Knight. A System of Psychology. N. Y., 1912. 
Fawcett, Edward D. The Individual and Reality. N. Y., 

1909. 
Fullerton, George S. A System of Metaphysics. N. Y., 

1904. 
Haldane, Richard B. The Pathway to Reality (2 Vols.). 

London, 1903-4. 
Holt, Edwin B. The Concept of Consciousness. London, 

1914. 

and Others. The New Realism. N. Y., 1912. 

James, William. Principles of Psychology (2 Vols.). 

N. Y., 1890. 
Ladd, George T. Philosophy of Mind. N. Y., 1895. 
Marshall, Henry R. Consciousness. N. Y., 1909. 
McDougall, William. Body and Mind. N. Y., 1911. 
MtJNSTERBERG, HuGO. Psychology and Life. Boston, 

1899. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 473 

MuNSTERBERG, HuGO. The Eternal Values. Boston, 1909. 
Perry, Ralph B. Present Philosophical Tendencies. 

N. Y., 1912. 
Prince, Morton. The Unconscious. N. Y., 1914. 
Piehl, a. Introduction to the Theory of Science and 

Metaphysics (Tr.). London, 1894. 
RoYCE, JosiAH. The World and the Individual (2 Vols.). 

N. Y., 1900. 
Stout, C. F. Analj^tic Psychology (2 Vols.). London, 

1896. 
Strong, C. A. Why the Mind Has a Body. N. Y., 1903. 
Taylor. Elements of Metaphysics. London, 1903. 
Urban, W. M. Valuation : Its Nature and Laws. London, 

1909. 
Ward, James. Naturalism and Agnosticism (2 Vols.). 

London, 1903. 

Chapters 6-10. 

Sensory Stimulations and Reactions. 

Allen, Grant. The Colour-Sense. London, 1892. 
Baldwin, J. Mark. Development and Evolution. N. Y., 

1902. 
Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in 

Men and Animals. 
Hobhouse, L. T. Mind in Evolution. London, 1901. 
Helmholtz, Hermann L. F. On the Sensations of Tone 

as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music 

(Tr.). London, 1885. 
Holmes, S. J. The Evolution of Animal Intelligence. 

N. Y., 1911. 
Howell, William H. Textbook of Physiology. Phila- 
delphia, 1910. 
Jennings, H. S. Behavior of the Lower Organisms. 

N. Y., 1906. 



474 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

JuDD, Charles H. Laboratory Equipment for Psycho- 
logical Experiments (3 Vols.). N. Y., 1907. 

Ladd, George T. Elements of Physiological Psychology. 
N. Y., 1911. 

LoEB, Jacques. Comparative Physiology of the Brain and 
Comparative Psychology. N. Y., 1902. 

McCabe, Joseph. The Evolution of Mind. London, 1910. 

McDouGALL, William. Psychology: The Study of Be- 
haviour. London, 1912. 

Meyer, Max. The Fundamental Laws of Human Be- 
haviour. Boston, 1911. 

Morgan, C. Lloyd. Habit and Instinct. London, 1896. 

. Animal Behaviour. London, 1900. 

: Instinct and Experience. N. Y., 1912. 

Myers, Charles S. A Textbook of Experimental Psychol- 
ogy (2 Vols.). Cambridge, 1911. 

Parmelee, Maurice. The Science of Human Behaviour. 
N. Y., 1913. 

Sanford, Edmund C. A Course in Experimental Psychol- 
ogy (2 Vols.). Boston, 1898. 

Seashore, Carl E. Elementary Experiments in Psychol- 
ogy. N. Y., 1908. 

Sherrington, C. I. The Integrative Action of the Nervous 
System. N. Y., 1911. 

TiTCHENER, Edward B. Experimental Psychology (4 
Parts). N. Y., 1909. 

Verworn, Max. General Physiology (Tr.). London, 
1899. 

Washburn, Margaret F. The Animal Mind. N. Y., 
1908. 

Wheeler, William M. Ants. N. Y., 1910. 

Wundt, Wilhelm. Principles of Physiological Psychol- 
ogy, Vol. 1 (Tr.). London, 1904. 

Yerkes, Robert M. The Dancing Mouse. N. Y., 1907. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 475 

Chapters 11-15. 
Mental Processes. 

Angell, James E. Chapters from Modern Psychology. 

N. Y., 1912. 
Arnold, Felix. Attention and Interest. N. Y., 1910. 
Bain, Alexander. The Emotion and the Will. N. Y., 

1886. 

. The Senses and the Intellect. N. Y., 1886. 

Baldwin, J. Mark. Handbook of Psychology. N. Y., 

1890. 
Binet, Alfred. Alterations of Personality (Tr.). 

London, 1896. 
Calkins, Mary W. An Introduction to Psychology. 

N.Y., 1901. 
Dewey, John. Psychology. N. Y., 1891. 

. How We Think. Boston, 1910. 

Ebbinghaus, Hermann. Psychology (Tr.). Boston, 1908. 
HoPFDiNG, Harald. Outlines of Psychology. London, 

1891. 
Jastrow, Joseph. The Subconscious. Boston, 1906. 
Judd, Charles H. Psychology: General Introduction. 

N. Y., 1907. 
KuLPE, Oswald. Outlines of Psychology. London, 1895. 
Ladd, George T. Psychology: Descriptive and Explan- 
atory. N. Y., 1894. 
Pierce, Arthur H. Studies in Auditory and Visual 

Space Perception. N. Y., 1901. 
PiLLSBURY, W. B. Attention. London, 1908. 

. The Essentials of Psychology. N. Y., 1912. 

Prince, Morton. The Dissociation of a Personality. 

N. Y., 1906. 
RiBOT, Th. The Psychology of Attention (Tr.). Chicago, 

1899. 



476 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

EiBOT, Th. The Evolution of General Ideas (Tr.). Chi- 
cago, 1899. 

. The Psychology of the Emotions (Tr.). Chicago, 

1897. 

RoYCE, JosiAH. Outlines of Psychology. N. Y., 1903. 

Scripture, Edward W. The Elements of Experimental 
Phonetics. N. Y., 1902. 

SiDis, Boris, and Goodhart, Simon P. Multiple Person- 
ality. N. Y., 1905. 

Stout, G. P. A Manual of Psychology. London, 1913. 

Sully, James. Handbook of Psychology. London, 1909. 

Thorndike, Edward L. The Elements of Psychology. 
N. Y., 1905. 

TiTCHENER, Edward B. Lectures on the Elementary 
Psychology of Feeling and Attention. N. Y., 1908. 

. Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the 

Thought Process. N. Y., 1909. 

. A Textbook of Psychology. N. Y., 1911. 

"WuNDT, WiLHELM. Lccturcs ou Human and Animal 
Psychology (Tr.). London, 1894. 

. Outlines of Psychology (Tr.). Leipzig, 1902. 

Yerkes, Robert M. Introduction to Psychology. N. Y., 
1911. 

Ziehen, Theodor. Introduction to Physiological Psychol- 
ogy (Tr.). London, 1895. 

Chapter 16. 
Individual Differences. 

Baldwin, J. Mark. Mental Development in the Child and 

the Race. N. Y., 1895. 
Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. N. Y., 1911. 
Chamberlain, Alexander F. The Child. London, 1907. 
Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its 

Developments. London, 1883. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 477 

Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius ; An Inquiry into Its 
Laws and Consequences. N. Y., 1887. 

Gehring, Albert. Racial Contrasts. N. Y., 1908. 

Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence (2 Vols.). N. Y., 1905. 

. Aspects of Child Life. Boston, 1907. 

HuEY, Edmund B. Backward and Feeble-Minded Chil- 
dren. Baltimore, 1912. 

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 
N. Y., 1902. 

Jastrow, Joseph. The Qualities of Men. Boston, 1910. 

KiRKPATRicK, Edwin A. Fundamentals of Child Study. 
N. Y., 1908. 

Le Bon, Gustave. The Psychology of Peoples (Tr.). 
N. Y., 1898. 

LoMBROSO, Cesare. The Man of Genius (Tr.). London, 
1905. 

Major, David R. First Steps in Mental Growth. N. Y., 
1906. 

Oppenheim, Nathan. The Development of the Child. 
N. Y., 1910. 

Preyer, W. The Mind of the Child (2 Vols.) (Tr.). 
N. Y., 1890. 

Sherlock, E. B. The Feeble-Minded. London, 1911. 

Shinn, Milicent W. Notes on the Development of a 
Child (2 Vols.). Berkeley, 1893. 

Thompson, Helen B. The Mental Traits of Sex. Chicago, 
1903. 

Thorndike, Edward L. Introduction, to the Theory of 
Mental and Social Measurements. N. Y., 1913. 

Tracy, Frederick, and Stimpfel, Joseph. The Psychol- 
ogy of Childhood. Boston, 1909. 

Tredgold, a. F. Mental Deficiency. London, 1908. 

Whipple, Guy IM. ]\Ianual of Mental and Physical Tests. 
Baltimore, 1910. 



478 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

Chapters 17-20. 
Social Psychology. 

Baldwin, J. Mark. Social and Ethical Interpretations in 

Mental Development. N. Y., 1897. 

. The Individual and Society. Boston, 1911. 

Brinton, Daniel G. The Basis of Social Relations. N. Y., 

1902. 
Davis, Michael M. Psychological Interpretations of 

Society. N. Y., 1909. 
Ellv^ood, Charles A. Sociology in Its Psychological 

Aspects. N. Y., 1912. 
GiDDiNGS, Franklin H. The Principles of Sociology. 

N. Y., 1896. 
Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd (Tr.). N. Y., 1896. 
. The Psychology of Revolution (Tr.). N. Y., 

1913. 
McDougall, "William. An Introduction to Social Psy- 
chology. London, 1908. 
Ross, Edward A. Social Psychology. N. Y., 1908. 
Small, Albion W. General Sociology. Chicago, 1905. 
Tarde, Gabriel. The Law of Imitation (Tr.). N. Y., 

1903. 

Chapters 27-29. 
Educational Psychology. 

Bagley, William C. The Educative Process. N. Y., 
1910. 

CoLViN, Stephen S. The Learning Process. N. Y., 1912. 

CoMPAYRE, Gabriel. The Intellectual and Moral Develop- 
ment of the Child (Tr.). N. Y., 1906. 

Hall, G. Stanley. Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and 
Hygiene. N. Y., 1907. 

. Educational Problems (2 Vols.). N. Y., 1911. 



BIBLIOGKAPHY 479 

HoRNE, Herman H. The Psychological Principles of 

Education. N. Y., 1908. 
James, William. Talks to Teachers. N. Y., 1908. 
JuDD, ChxVRLes H. Genetic Psychology for Teachers. 

N. Y., 1909. 
Meumann, E. The Psychology of Learning (Tr.). N. Y., 

1913. 
MoNTEssoRi, Marie. The Montessori Method (Tr.). N. Y., 

1912. 
MtJNSTERBERG, HuGO. Psychology and the Teacher. N. Y., 

1909. 
Offner, Max. Mental Fatigue (Tr.). Baltimore, 1911. 
Pyle, William H. Outlines of Educational Psychology. 

Baltimore, 1911. 
Rowe, Stuart H. Habit-Formation and the Science of 

Teaching. N. Y., 1909. 
ScHULZE, R. Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy 

(Tr.). N. Y., 1912. 
Seashore, Carl E. Psychology in Daily Life. N. Y., 

1913. 
Starch, Daniel. Experiments in Educational Psychol- 
ogy. N. Y., 1911. 
Swift, Edgar J. Mind in the Making. N. Y., 1909. 
Thorndike, Edward L. Educational Psychology (3 

Vols.). N. Y., 1913. 

Chapter 33. 
Legal Psychology. 

Arnold, G. F. Psychology Applied to Legal Evidence. 

Calcutta, 1906. 
Aschaffenburg, Gustave. Crime and Its Repression 

(Tr.). Boston, 1913. 
Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. London, 1907. 
Gross, Hans. Criminal Psychology (Tr.). Boston, 1911. 



480 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

K^ELLOR, Frances. Experimental Sociology, Analytical 

and Descriptive. N. Y., 1901. 
Moore, Charles C. A Treatise on Facts, or, The Weight 

and Value of Evidence (2 Vols.). Northport, 1908. 
MtJNSTERBERG, HuGO. On the Witness Stand. N. Y., 1908. 
WiGMORE, John H. The Principles of Judicial Proof. 

Boston, 1913. 

Chapter 31. 
Economic Psychology. 

Book, William F. The Psychology of Skill. Missoula, 
1908. 

Emerson, Harrington. The Twelve Principles of Effi- 
ciency. N. Y., 1912. 

GiLBRETH, Frank B. Motion Study. N. Y., 1911. 

GiLBRETH, L. M. The Psychology of Management. N. Y., 
1914. 

GoLDMARK, Josephine. Fatigue and Efficiency. N. Y., 
1912. 

HoLLiNGWORTH, Harry L. The Influence of Caffein on 
Mental and Motor Efficiency. N. Y., 1912. 

. Advertising and Selling. N. Y., 1913. 

Mosso, A. Fatigue (Tr.). London, 1906. 

MtJNSTERBERG, HuGO. Psychology and Industrial Effi- 
ciency. Boston, 1913. 

■ — . Psychology and Social Sanity. N. Y., 1914. 

Parsons, Frank. Choosing a Vocation. Boston, 1909. 

Scott, Walter D. The Psychology of Advertising. Bos- 
ton, 1910. 

Taylor, Frederick W. Shop Management. N. Y., 1903. 

. The Principles of Scientific Management. N. Y., 

1911. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 481 

Chapter 32. 
Medical Psychology. 

Bernheim, H. Suggestive Therapeutics (Tr.). N. Y., 
1880. 

Castle, William E., and Others. Heredity and Eugenics. 
Chicago, 1912. 

Clark, L. Pierce, and Diefendorf, A. Ross. Neurologi- 
cal and Mental Diagnosis. N. Y., 1908. 

Davenport, Charles B. Heredity in Relation to Eu- 
genics. N. Y., 1911. 

Dubois, Paul. The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Dis- 
orders (Tr.). N. Y., 1906. 

. The Education of Self (Tr.). N. Y., 1911. 

Franz, S. I. Handbook of Mental Examination Methods. 
N. Y., 1912. 

Jacoby, George W. Suggestion and Psychotherapy. 
N. Y., 1912. 

Janet, Pierre. The Mental State of Hystericals (Tr.). 
N. Y., 1901. 

. The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (Tr.). N. Y., 

1907. 

Jones, Ernest. Papers on Psycho-Analysis. N. Y., 
1913. 

Kraepelin, Emil, and Diefendorf, A. Ross. Clinical 
Psychiatry. N. Y., 1907. 

Mercier, Charles A. Psychology, Normal and Morbid. 
London, 1901. 

Moll, Albert. Hypnotism (Tr.). N. Y., 1909. 

MtJNSTERBERG, HuGO. Psychotherapy. N. Y., 1909. 

Saleeby, Caleb W. Parenthood and Race Culture. 
N. Y., 1910. 

SiDis, Boris. The Psychology of Suggestion. N. Y., 1898. 

. Psychopathological Researches. Boston, 1908. 



482 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

Stoddart, W. H. B. Mind and Its Disorders. Philadel- 
phia, 1909. 
Thompson, J. Arthur. Heredity. N. Y., 1908. 
Wetterstrand, Otto G. Hypnotism (Tr.). N. Y., 1902. 

Chapter 33. 

Cultural Psychology. 

Gordon, Kate. ^Esthetics. N. Y., 1909. 

Leuba, James H. A Psychological Study of Eeligion. 

N. Y., 1912. 
McCoMAS, Henry C. The Psychology of Religions Sects. 

N. Y., 1912. 
MtJNSTERBERG, HuGO. Principles of Art Education. N. Y., 

1905. 
Puffer, Ethel. Psychology of Beauty. Boston, 1904. 
Rowland, Eleanor. The Significance of Art. Boston, 

1913. 
Scott, Walter D. The Psychology of Public Speaking. 

Philadelphia, 1907. 
Starbuck, Edwin D. The Psychology of Religion. Lon- 
don, 1908. 
Stratton, George M. Experimental Psychology and Its 

Bearing upon Culture. N. Y., 1903. 



INDEX 



Abnormal, 241, 276, 393 
Achievement, 275 
Acknowledgment, 43, 290 
Action, 35, 138, 162, 178, 183, 

205, 255, 289, 376, 382, 426 
Action theory, 139, 155, 159, 

162, 191, 216 
Activity, 176 
Adrenalin, 206 
Advertising, 429 
After-effect, 107 
After-image, 81 
Ag'e, 228 
Aggression, 262 
Agreement, 330 
Alcohol, 411 

Altruistic sensations, 67, 261 
Analysis, 14 
Animal, 38, 54, 62, 186, 250, 

276 
Antagonists, 138, 199, 259 
Anticipation, 177, 183, 193 
Apperception, 163, 372, 438 
Application, 5, 16, 341, 352 
Apprentice, 421 
Art, 338, 361, 455 
Association, 22, 30, 107, 110, 

119, 134, 141, 215, 374, 405, 

439 
Astronomy, 360, 463 



Atom, 134 

Attention, 129, 187, 370, 431, 

440 
Attitude, 11, 146, 173, 207, 289 
Auditory stimulation, 85 
Automatic, 184, 186 

Beats, 89 

Beauty, 207, 338 

Behavior, 213 

Black, 72 

Blood-vessels, 35, 206 

Brain, 34, 40, 57, 61, 113, 118, 

137, 139, 438 
Brightness, 75 

Causal psychology, 15, 43, 288 

Causality, 300 

Character, 238 

Child, 51, 55, 227, 250, 260, 

294, 367, 375 
Choroid, 82 
Clearness, 189 
Cold spots, 100 
Color theory, 83 
Colors, 73, 369, 457 
Commerce, 413, 428 
Communication, 248 
Comparative observations, 38 
Complementary color, 80 
Cones, 82 
Confession, 404 



483 



484 



INDEX 



Consciousness, 24, 220 
Consistency, 14 
Constellation, 120 
Contiguity, 111 
Contrast, 80 
Convergence, 129, 151 
Conversation, 23 
Cooperation, 67 
Correlation, 240 
Court, 395 

Creation, 293, 321, 326 
Criminal, 12, 406 
Cultural psychology, 452 

Darkness, 77 
Darwinism, 60 
Defectives, 393, 408 
Definition, 7 
Depth, 148 

Determining tendency, 181 
Development, 61 
Diagnosis, 437 
Difference, 160 
Difference tones, 94 
Direction, 148, 156 
Discipline, 386 
Disease, 241, 243, 437 
Display, 432 
Displeasure, 196, 381 
Dispositions, 26 
Double personality, 222 
Drainage, 139 
Drama, 52 
Dream, 171, 306 
Duration, 157 

Ear, 92 

Economics, 413 
Education, 342, 347, 365 



Elements, 70 
Emotion, 203, 257 
Enjoyment, 454 
Escape, 125 
Esthetics, 207, 456 
Ether waves, 78 
Eugenics, 410, 448 
Excitement, 202 
Expansion, 147 
Expectation, 169 
Explanation, 11, 29 
Expression, 249 
Eye, 81 

Fatigue, 384, 425, 427 
Feeling, 184, 197, 201, 380 
Freedom, 17, 293, 296, 323 
Frequency, 119 
Functional psychology, 45 
Fusion, 88, 133 

General ideas, 172 

Gestures, 250 

Glands, 35, 127, 206, 245 

Gray, 73 

Group, 44, 224, 231, 270, 359 

.Habit, 126, 377, 422 
Hallucination, 116, 164 
Heat, 101 

Hemispheres, 65, 123 
Hidden ideas, 402, 442 
Historian, 355, 466 
History, 333, 352, 363 
Hunger, 106 

Hypnotism, 55, 255, 257, 408 
Hysteria, 132, 244, 436 

Ideas, 165 
Identity, 218 



INDEX 



485 



Idiocy, 246 

Illusion, 116, 152, 163, 169 

Imageless thought, 194 
Imagination, 165, 170, 195, 238 
Imitation, 259, 376 
Immediacy, 32, 285 
Immortality, 308 
Impressions, 70 
Impressiveness, 120, 369 
Impulse, 175 
Indirect observation, 50 
Individual differences, 224, 343, 

357, 371, 389, 417, 426 
Industry, 413 
Inheritance, 237 
Inhibition, 131, 138, 189, 208, 

258 
Instinct, 184 
Institutions, 268 
Intellectual, 209 
Intelligence, 194, 210, 238, 391 
Intensity, 117, 189 
Intercourse, 330 
Internal stimulation, 101 
Interpretation, 330 
Interval, 158 
Introspection, 48 

Joints, 103 
Judgment, 193 

Kinesthetic sensations, 104, 128, 

154, 178, 181, 200 
Kinship, 252 
Knowledge, 369 

Labor, 253 

Language, 66, 250, 361 
Law, 395 



Laws, 21 
Leadership, 280 
Learning, 165, 374, 421 
Lens, 82, 150 
Light sensations, 72 
Literature, 311 
Love, 252,--g62 
Lust, 106 

Masses, 52 

Maturity, 227 

Meaning, 160, 251, 301, 304, 

310^ 325 
Measurement, 55 
Medical psychology, 435 
Memory, 108, 165, 317, 365, 

374, 398, 430, 439 
Modifiability, 107 
Monotony, 425 
Motives, 179, 380 
Movement sensation, 101, 153, 

181 
Muscles, 61, 104, 150 
Music, 86, 362, 460 

Nativistic, 155 
Kearness, 149 
Necessity, 31 
Nervous system, 59 
Neurasthenic, 244 
Noises, 91 
Normative acts, 336 
Novelist, 311 

Observer, 9 
Octave, 88 
Opposites, 315, 445 
Optical stimulation, 72 
Organization, 168, 246, 265 



486 



INDEX 



Overin dividual standards, 337 
Overtones, 90 

Pain, 101, 105, 184 

Parallelism, 39, 42 

Pathology, 57 

Pauses, 385 

Perception, 22, 35, 145, 317, 

369, 397 
Periodical wave, 91 
Perseverance, 109 
Personality, 213, 322, 357 
Persuasion, 444 
Philology, 468 
Physiology, 45, 112 
Pitch, 86 
Plants, 43 
Play, 186, 253, 455 
Pleasure, 184, 196, 381, 454 
Poetry, 52, 460 
Preparedness, 140, 194, 211 
Pressure, 99 

Prevention of crime, 409 
Prevention of disease, 448 
Primitive peoples, 226, 234 
Protection, 125 
Pseudo-psychology, 341 
Psychasthenic, 244 
Psychoanalysis, 442, 448 
Psychogram, 357 
Psychohistorical, 352 
Psychophysical law, 80, 84 
Psychotechnical, 354 
Psychotherapy, 443 
Punishment, 324 
Purposive psychology, 15, 33, 

285, 295, 363 

Qualitative, 56 
Quantitative, 55 



Race, 231 

Reaction, 62, 122, 161, 183, 207, 

370 
Reading, 379 
Reality, 285, 288, 327 
Recall, 167 
Recency, 120 
Recognition, 163 
Relief, 202 

Repetition, 126, 167, 377, 458 
Reproduction, 110, 116, 119, 

166, 398 
Resistance, 112, 126, 256 
Responsibility, 324, 408 
Retention, 167 
Retina, 81, 149 
Rhythm, 209, 424 
Rivalry, 179 
Rods, 82 • 

Salesman, 433 

Sameness, 303, 316 

Saturation, 75, 457 

School, 382, 387 

Scientific management, 415 

Scientist, 360, 462 

Self, 12, 292, 306 

Selfassertion, 262 

Selfconsciousness, 25, 216, 308, 

322 
Selfexpression, 263 
Selfobservation, 47, 55, 469 
Semicircular canals, 104 
Sensation, 71 
Sex, 231 

Sexual instinct, 185 
Similarity, 113, 133 
Simplicity, 76 
Skin, 100 



INDEX 



Smell, 97 

Social events, 359 

Social experiences, 329 

Social psychology, 44, 224, 314 

Sociology, 225 

Somnambulist, 24 

Sonl, 297, 306 

Sound, 85, 153 

Space, 129, 147 

Span, 131, 157 

Spinal cord, 108 

Stereoscope, 149 

Stimulation, 70, 145 

Structural psychology, 45 

Subconscious, 25, 215, 244, 435 

Submission, 254 

Subordination, 259 

Suggestibility, 257, 398, 445, 

466 
Suggestion, 254 
Suppression, 134 
Symmetry, 458 
Sympathy, 261, 330 

Taste, 95 

Teacher, 294, 367, 382, 394 
Technique, 360, 423 
Temperament, 235 
Temperance, 411 
Temperature, 100 
Tension, 104, 158, 202 



Testimony, 400 

Tests, 239, 392, 419 

Thirst, 106 

Thought, 192, 210, 378 

Tickling, 106 

Timbre, 86 

Time, 130, 156, 170, 301 

Tones, 85, 133 

Tool, 65 

Training, 389, 421 

Truth, 337 

Typewriting, 321 

Unconscious, 24 

Understanding, 11, 329 

Uniformity, 425 

Union, 246 

Unity, 145, 213, 459 

Usefulness, 60, 205, 247, 275 

Values, 9, 335 
Visual stimuli, 78 
Vividness, 118, 138, 189 
Vocation, 235, 416 

Warm spots, 100 

White, 73 

Will, 176, 299, 316, 323, 335, 

441 
Witness, 395 
Words, 161, 174 
Writing, 251, 379 



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